Bluetooth PAN not 'connecting'; [Alert: using F13 & F14]

Ron Leach ronleach at tesco.net
Sun May 6 10:38:58 UTC 2012


List, good morning,

Experiencing difficulty in connecting from a netbook to a mobile phone 
using Bluetooth PAN.  And may I say - up front - before people waste 
time they cannot spare, the netbooks are running F13 and F14; I do 
realise these are out of date and I understand if folks choose not to 
reply - if at all - in anything other than fairly general terms.

Objective is to connect to internet through a mobile phone using PAN 
connection over Bluetooth.  Bluetooth - generally - is working on both 
netbooks, ie, under F13 and F14.  Previously used Bluetooth in 'Dial 
Up Networking' style of connection which has worked fine.  (The phone 
and Bluetooth works in PAN mode with this netbook (and with other 
devices) using different OS, so the mobile side is - probably - ok.) 
Network Manager sees the phone, and lists (on its menu) it as a device 
that it could 'connect' to; everything seems to be 'paired' properly. 
  (During pairing, I selected the 'connect using PAN' checkbox - I 
imagine this is 'how' Network Manager 'knows' that the device is 
connectable-to.)

When I click the NM menu item to connect to this phone, one or two 
seconds later the netbook reports - in a pop-up message - that the 
network connection has been 'disconnected'.  On the phone, the 
Bluetooth icon changes from idle to 'connected', then a second or so 
later reverts to idle, so some kind of communication attempt is being 
made from the netbook to the phone, but the PAN connection is not 
stabilising.

Honestly, the best advice I could hope for - if anyone can help - is 
to advise where I could find a log just to see what's going on.  I'm 
pretty sure that once I have a clue from the log, there'll be various 
posts in various places where people have encountered this before, and 
solved it; initial searches haven't thrown anything up for me and I 
need to search using more specific keywords, I think.

I'm also wondering whether some base configuration information is 
missing from a file in /etc/bluetooth.  On the F14 netbook, there are 
only two conf files:

main.conf
rfcomm.conf

and neither contain entries describing the PAN service.

Thanks for reading this; I wouldn't expect anyone to recall what the 
F13/F14 Bluetooth configurations were, but if anyone could point me 
towards a log file that might show what didn't work, I'd be very grateful,

regards, Ron



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