I’m quite pleased with 3 Mobile Broadband, the only serious issue was a daily kernel panic…and since there are no better drivers from Huawei, the solution was not to use those drivers, but to plug the 3G dongle into a non-​OS X machine.

I tested a Billion BiPAC 7402NX router, it works perfectly, but it is not a mobile solution. I actually don’t need additional hardware to run Linux, using VMware I installed Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition, which can use the USB dongle; the new issue was in having the host OS X system use that Linux instance as a gateway.

After hours of fiddling with VMware and OS X network settings, I ended up using this setup:

  • VMware virtual machine network set to NAT, eth0 configured manually (such that it will use eth0 connection only for resources on that network)
  • A squid3 proxy server (set to listen on 0.0.0.0 and accept connections from private IPs)
  • In OS X a network location setting that uses the Ubuntu instance’s IP as proxy and with
  • a Wi-​Fi network created with AirPort (to get an IP for the OS X, and have my iPod Touch connect to internet).