Pete's Eats

I’ve just migrated to a new 17″ MBP from an AIR and given that the migration process is very slow and very prone to errors because everything has to be done via wifi (no firewire on the AIR) I decided to install this machine from scratch.

There are lots of benefits to doing this but two weeks later I’m still finding things I’ve missed and need to install/retrieve from my fileserver etc…

I have encountered some issues though and the one that stumped me the most for a while was being unable to install my 3 3g dongle. Well, more precisely, not being able to install the management software for it. I had it running and connecting through the network prefpane pretty easily, but the official software also allows you to monitor and therefore keep a track of the amount of data you’re using and as it was a bulk payg account this was pretty useful.

Three’s website is pointless when it comes to support, and Huawei’s isn’t much better unfortunately and their both even more rubbish at identifying error codes when you have no other information to go on.

When installing my modem’s software, I kept receiving a “Error 5370″ dialog box with no other warning. So, I copied, manually, all of the files (plists and preferences etc) from my old machine and put them onto my new machine in the right place. From that point, the 3Connect app could see my usb stick and tell me what network was available/strength etc. But, it still could not connect and informed me that the profile had no location information. Upon opening the profile manager (Tools > HSDPA/UMTS/GPRS Options > Manage Profiles) it would ask me to select a profile and then I could apply the settings, unfortunately the app then gave a bbd for a few seconds and crashed without altering anything.

I figured that it was something to do with files not being written, therefore a permissions error. Running disk utility and verifying the permissions a few times didn’t make a difference and the web was strangely devoid of references to this error. So, the only option open to me was to try and install the app as ‘root’ and see if that enabled the files to be written.

To do this, I opened a new terminal window and navigated to the 3Connect folder. Then I typed ‘sudo open “3Connect Setup Installer”; the system asked for me to confirm my password and then opened the app. I assumed that I was now running as root and continued to install.

It didn’t work.

For the last week I’ve mulled this over trying to figure out why I can’t get this damn thing running and this morning figured it out. Running the app as root like that actually doesn’t run the app as root… The app is actually contained within the ‘app’ reference. If you go to any OSX app and right click you’ll see a “Show Package Contents” option and if you go further into that you’ll find all of the resources and images etc that the app uses.

So, to cut an even longer story short, if you are having the same problem as described above then you need to do the following:

1. 1. Open a terminal and navigate your way to the “3Connect Setup Assistant” whether you have a copy in your ‘Applications/3Connect/’ folder or on the usb stick drive itself doesn’t matter as far as I can tell
2. 2. Type (with the quotes intact): sudo “/Applications/3Connect/3Connect Setup Assistant.app/Contents/MacOS/MobileManager Setup Assistant”
3. 3. Follow the UI as normal; this should be now running as the root user and be able to write the necessary files without any further problems

Just running the ’3Connect Setup Assistant’ as root won’t work.

Happy surfing.