SAGEM Fast 800 Success story

Browsing this forum I've read a number of horror stories regarding this dreaded piece of hardware, namely the "Sagem Fast 800" USB ADSL. I'm frankly surprised of Reading about so many trouble and since I have it working both on Red Hat 9 and Slack-ware 9.1 (my ISP is Telecom Italia), I've decided to put some order on the issue.

before I start, I would have liked to give some useful link, but since I'm not yet allowed to give url on this forum :-((( I must limit myself to suggest you the web-modems/download section of the Sagem site (.com and not .fr)

and the eagle-sub site (its a .org), there you wil find and interesting table on the configuration parameters for many adsl providers



Installing the drivers requires just a basic understanding of linux and a careful reading of the installation notes given by Sagem both in English and French.

1) go to the sagem site and download fast800.2.0.7_fr.tgz and the txt file of installation note.
Sagem says the driver is compatible with:
* Mandrake 8.2, 9.0 and 9.1
* Red-hat 7.2, 8.0 and 9.0
* SuSE 9.0
I had Slack-ware 9.1 (and probably, but not tested 9.0) to the list.

2) check that you have the following packages installed:
* Kernel source
* gcc-cpp

3) compile and install:

* create a build directory, copy there the tgz file and uncompress it:

tar xvzf fast800.2.0.7_fr.tgz

this will create 2 subdirectories:
ADI_DRIVER
ADI_PPPOA

* it's important that you compile the ADI DRIVER first!!!
cd ADI_DRIVER
su -
<give the root passwd>

verify your kernel version with uname -r

just to give an example let's suppose the output of uname -r is 2.4.20-22


./Install_All linux-2.4.20-22 or whatever kernel version you're using

verify you did not have compilation errors. It would be a wise move to log the whole installation with the script command. Common causes of compilation errors are:
- kernel source not installed;
- kernel source in a directory different than usual
- include files in a directory different than usual (I had this once on a previous red hat and solved it creating a link from the include directory and the one expected by the make file)

Now plug-in the modem, wait for the driver to come up (it could take some time) and verify that all went well with the following command:

ifconfig -a

this will give you the list of your ip interface, check that the ADIModem is there.
IF IT IS NOT THERE ,TRY REBOOTING YOUR SYSTEM AND WAIT FOR BOTH LIGHT ON THE MODE TO STAY ON (NOT FLASHING)

* configure the modem by editing /etc/analog/adiusbadsl.conf
to do so read carefully the info on the configuration parameter given by the link above. Be careful for you won't be able to connect if they're wrong. You can try to call the help desk of your adsl provider and ask for the value you need but 90 out of 100 they will kindly answer that linux is not supported by them :-<

please note that VCI and VPI values are sometimes given in decimal and sometimes in hexadecimal, but IN THE CONF FILE THEY MUST BE IN HEXADECIMAL FORMAT (this is another common mistake)

4) Install and configure your connection stack:
my adsl provider uses PPPoA and I do not have first hand experience of others.

make a backup copy of /etc/ppp/options (if the file exists)
cp /etc/ppp/options /etc/ppp/options.bck

go to the ADI_PPPOA directory and launch the installation script
./PPP_INSTALL

As a last command the script should ask you if you want to overwrite the options file: ANSWER Y

Check that you had no error and go configure your stack.
Follow the instruction given by sage and update the following files:
- /etc/ppp/chap-secrets
- /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
- /etc/ppp/options

If your adsl provider gives you an auto-DNS configuration (very very common option) create a symbolic link as follows

ln -sf /etc/ppp/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

NOW YOU'RE READY TO SURF.

DO NOT USE THE FANCY GUI LIKE KPPP OR SIMILAR BUT STARTUP AND SHUTDOWN YOUR CONNECTION WITH THE FOLLOWING:

STARTUP

$ su -
password : "root" password
ADI_PPP_Go


SHUTDOWN

$ su -
password : "root" password
ADI_PPP_Stop

You can verify your connection with ifconfig -a, it should list the presence of a ppp0 interface.

This is an outline of the whole procedure, check the Sagem site for more detailed instructions


Ciao,
Marcello

Nice one. Could you also post this to a few newsgroups? comp.os.linux.hardware and perhaps it.comp.os.linux.iniziare as well.

Moved to appropriate forum matching the character of the post.


Cheers,
Tink

The eagle-usb driver is available at http://dev.eagle-usb.org/wakka.php?wiki=TestEagleUs (with installation documentation)

Here are all modems it supports : http://faq.eagle-usb.org/wakka.php?wiki=ModemSupport (sagem fast 800, 908, comtrend ct 350 / 361, elcon, at ar215, telindus ND220, ...)

It's a corrected / enhanced version of original GPL driver furnished by Analog Digital (hence by sagem, who uses the chipset).

The forum support (English & French) is open : http://forum.eagle-usb.org/viewforum.php?f=7

Hi everybody, first of all I installed the driver on RedHat 9 with success because when
I run /sbin/ifconfig -a I get ADIModem. However there is a problem with my provider wich uses RFC 1483 Bridge with a VCI/VPI pair of 0/35 and my IP is allocated via DHCP.
But under Windoze I see always the same IP address, so I ran these two commands
ifconfig ADIModem 82.101.161.183 netmask 255.255.255.128
route add gw 82.101.161.129
and finally I entered in resolv.conf the DNS servers.
Still I could not access the internet. So what is the problem and how to resolv it???
Thanks folks...

You'd better give a try to eagle-usb-2.0.0 which is available

http://dev.eagle-usb.org/wakka.php?wiki=EagleUsb200

you'll have a tool eaglediag to help diagnose problems :
eaglediag -mscn # will provide necessary information
(I hope you will not need it ;-) )

As you seem to have a static IP, you may choose this option when running eagleconfig

It works with mandrake 10.1, all i did was install mandrake, the modem was plugged in at the time and i set up the connection and it worked. No problems

Hey everybody! what about the the linux CentOS4 version? I managed to follow all the instructions given by the english tutorial of the modem...I can connect to internet too but i can't access any web page...i've been configuring the proxies but i think it wasn't that either....maybe that's because i'm still pretty green when it comes to linux...lol
hope you can help me with this...