Installing the Belkin Bluetooth Dongles under Linux

Author:  David Cottingham

The DTG has three Belkin F8T008 Bluetooth dongles. These are Class I (i.e. theoretical range 100 m) USB type.

To get these installed, follow the steps described at the  Gentoo Bluetooth HOWTO (i.e. install the relevant packages, then start up the relevant daemons using the bluetooth init.d script, check that they're running, and see if hciconfig gives any output).

If you get the error

Can't open HCI socket: Address family not supported by protocol

Have a look at /var/log/messages. If there are failures in finding modules.dep then you are likely to be running a kernel version that is lower than the most recent one you have installed. This happens regularly with Suse autoupdate if you don't restart! Reboot the machine and all should be well.

Once you have l2ping working, next ensure that the following line is present in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf, on at least the node you will make the "master" node (GN = Group Ad-Hoc Network Controller)

lm accept, master;

Also, do not be tempted to change the line

class 0x100xxx

(Where xxx is some number). A prefix of 0x020 seems to result in the connection timing out (Connect to 00:0a:... failed. Connection timed out(110)).

You must

modprobe bnep

On both machines.

Having performed the above, and followed the remainder of the HOWTO linked to above, you should be able to get normal IPv4 ping working.

Notes:

Messages in /var/log/messages such as

Oct 20 14:36:01 foss kernel: hci_usb_rx_complete: hci0 corrupted packet: type 4 count 1

appear to not be catastrophic (!). However, the dongle that caused these messages to be outputted soon afterwards stopped working altogether (discovery/scan included), even under Windows. You have been warned!

If you come across

Connect to 00:0a:3a... failed. Connection refused(111)

You probably aren't running pand on the machine you're trying to connect to.

If you get

Connect to 00:0a:3a... failed. Connection timed out(110)

and the class line is correct (see above), you will need to

/etc/init.d/bluetooth stop

Unplug the bluetooth dongle, then

/etc/init.d/bluetooth start

and plug the dongle back in. Re-pair the devices and try an l2ping, then start up pand again on both machines and the connect should succeed. It appears to be very temperamental...!