Bringing up freedompop on beaglebone black angstrom

Question

I have a freedompop Ubee stick that I would like to connect to my beaglebone black (running angstrom with 3.2.0-54-generic kernel). After solving some issues with hotswapping (it's not possible apparently), I am seeing the the interface in using ifconfig. But when I try bringing it up nothing happens:

root@beaglebone:~# ifconfig eth1 up
root@beaglebone:~# udhcpc eth1
udhcpc (v1.20.2) started
Sending discover...
Sending discover...
Sending discover...

Something also strange is that the interface initially has an address:

root@beaglebone:~# ifconfig eth1
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1D:88:53:2F:52 
      inet addr:192.168.14.2  Bcast:192.168.14.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      inet6 addr: fe80::21d:88ff:fe53:2f52/64 Scope:Link
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:22 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:48 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
      RX bytes:2542 (2.4 KiB)  TX bytes:9062 (8.8 KiB)

But a few moments ( < 1 minute) later, if I run the same command, eth1 no longer has an address, bcast, etc:

root@beaglebone:~# ifconfig eth1
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1D:88:53:2F:52  
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:25 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:51 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
      RX bytes:2730 (2.6 KiB)  TX bytes:9240 (9.0 KiB)

Under no circumstance (before or after address is stripped in ifconfig) can I ever ping something.

I have tried re-assigning the address, mask, etc, but nothing helps. Bring the interface up or down does not help. I tried manually creating an interfaces file and that didn't help either.

Answer 1

To solve this problem, I had to:

1. Add an inet dhcp interface in /etc/network/interfaces:

   iface eth1 inet dhcp 
   

2. Add the freedompop as a nameserver in resolve.conf

   nameserver 192.168.14.1
   

3. Bring up the interface

   ifup eth1