When the next Android 2.2 release (Froyo) is eventually released it will be packing USB tethering by default. What is tethering you ask? Basically it allows your phone to act as a modem and share its wireless data connection with a laptop. The bad news is that even after it is released you will have to wait for it to be tested and ported to the Droid or Incredible. In the meantime there is a great way to get the same functionality without rooting your phone. This method involves a free application called azilink which uses an OpenVPN connection to route data traffic between your computer and Android device. This has been tested on Ubuntu and Fedora but it is sure to work on any flavor of Linux.
The original method is posted here.
The azilink app homepage. http://code.google.com/p/azilink/
Comments (10)
on May 18, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Hello Ryan… Thanks for posting this! Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve created a script to set this up for the Ubuntu 9.10+ machines … See it on my blog at humans-enabled.com, or use the direct link to it:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/394584/Droid-Tether-SV.tgz
Instructions here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/394584/Droid-Tether-SV-README
Enjoy!
on May 26, 2010 at 10:03 am
Thanks for the update!
on January 28, 2011 at 12:50 pm
Hey Shannon,
Your script failed on my Fedora 14 install but I popped a livecd of Ubuntu 10.10 in my machine and it ran like a champ. thanks for throwing this together.
on June 16, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Hi Ryan, I currently use a similar setup with Proxoid but it seems to only use 1 port (8080 by default). Does AziLink use multiple ports?
on June 28, 2010 at 6:21 am
I don’t believe that it uses multiple ports. This line does port forwarding from host port 41927 to android port 41927.
adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927on August 11, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Hi Ryan
You forgot to put /etc/resolv.conf instread of resolv.conf
in the line :
sudo echo "nameserver 192.168.56.1" >> resolv.conf
Thanks for your tutorial it was very clear and helpfull to me !
on August 19, 2010 at 10:24 am
Good catch thanks, fixed now.
on August 17, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Ryan,
Thanks for the info, this is the most straight forward setup I have seen to date to get this accomplished.
Thanks again!
on September 3, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Hi Ryan,
Perhaps you can help me. I am using your script with limited success to tether my Fedora 13 workstation to my Evo 4G.
The short story, I run the script, start AziLink on my Evo, and get ‘Status: Connected to host’ reported by AziLink. Unfortunately, AziLink also shows ‘Bytes received: 0, Bytes sent: 0, TCP connections: 0, NAT table size: 0′. I don’t get any indications of networking.
More details
Output from android_tether:
# ./android_tether
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 OpenVPN 2.1.1 x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu [SSL] [LZO2] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] built on Jan 5 2010
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 WARNING: --ping should normally be used with --ping-restart or --ping-exit
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 NOTE: OpenVPN 2.1 requires '--script-security 2' or higher to call user-defined scripts or executables
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 ******* WARNING *******: all encryption and authentication features disabled -- all data will be tunnelled as cleartext
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 TUN/TAP device tun0 opened
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 /sbin/ip link set dev tun0 up mtu 1500
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 /sbin/ip addr add dev tun0 local 192.168.56.2 peer 192.168.56.1
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 WARNING: potential route subnet conflict between local LAN [128.32.147.0/255.255.255.0] and remote VPN [128.0.0.0/128.0.0.0]
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 Attempting to establish TCP connection with 127.0.0.1:41927 [nonblock]
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 TCP connection established with 127.0.0.1:41927
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 TCPv4_CLIENT link local: [undef]
Fri Sep 3 15:36:35 2010 TCPv4_CLIENT link remote: 127.0.0.1:41927
Fri Sep 3 15:36:45 2010 Peer Connection Initiated with 127.0.0.1:41927
Fri Sep 3 15:36:45 2010 Initialization Sequence Completed
Contents of resolv.conf after starting checks out:
#cat /etc/resolv.conf
domain lan
search lan
nameserver 192.168.56.1
What can I see?
# ping http://www.ibm.com
ping: unknown host http://www.ibm.com
Or, explicitly providing an IP address (for http://www.ibm.com.cs186.net):
# ping 129.42.56.216
PING 129.42.56.216 (129.42.56.216) 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
What about the device?
# ping 192.168.56.0
PING 192.168.56.0 (192.168.56.0) 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
# ping 192.168.56.1
PING 192.168.56.1 (192.168.56.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
# ping 192.168.56.2
PING 192.168.56.2 (192.168.56.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.56.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.56.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.021 ms
Finally, for what it’s worth, here’s what ifconfig has to say:
# ifconfig tun0
tun0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:192.168.56.2 P-t-P:192.168.56.1 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
I’m not sure how to interpret this (I’ve little expertise on networking), but it seems that the host can talk with the device, but not the nameserver.
Any suggestions?
thanks,
-Mark
on September 9, 2010 at 12:14 pm
does this work for windows?
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on August 5, 2010 at 3:15 pm