Before we start: [[insert usual disclaimers about this technically violating the Verizon TOS]]. With that out of the way ...
PDANet looks like a good solution for battery-chewing Bluetooth DUN tethering, but their $30 proprietary desktop app is for wired tethering on Windows only. Where does that leave us OS X folks who want a straightforward wired tethering solution, or something open source?
I've tried Tetherbot + Foxyproxy, but that's Firefox-only and I never could get the DNS to resolve properly through the phone's connection.
I stumbled on azilink, which works by running a vpn tunnel through your phone. But azilink is strongly biased towards Windows users, to the point that the author says "if you're using linux, or god forbid, OS X..." in his directions. And the preferred client for azilink, OpenVPN 2, is a headache to install directly on OS X (you can install Macports or build it by hand from source, but that's a nonstarter for most users).
That said, with a little setup work, you can get everything to tether by running one shell script. I assume you know your way around a BASH prompt here (if you don't, this is decidedly not the right solution for you).
Phew! But once that initial setup is done, all you have to do to tether your phone is:
To make it even easier in the future: Right-click the shell script in the Finder, choose Get Info, and Open With -> Applications/Utilities/Terminal (DON'T apply that to all; that could be risky). Then you can run the script by just double-clicking it in the Finder without having to go through manually starting a Terminal session.
That pre-first-run setup's a bit of a hassle, but it should be *much* more friendly on the batteries than BT or Wifi-based solutions, and this runs using entirely free open-source tools.
Big thanks to Mochabyte on the xda-developers Dream forum for doing most of the hard work; I just streamlined the process to not require macports and openvpn2 from source, and added (hopefully) straightforward directions for the whole setup process.
PDANet looks like a good solution for battery-chewing Bluetooth DUN tethering, but their $30 proprietary desktop app is for wired tethering on Windows only. Where does that leave us OS X folks who want a straightforward wired tethering solution, or something open source?
I've tried Tetherbot + Foxyproxy, but that's Firefox-only and I never could get the DNS to resolve properly through the phone's connection.
I stumbled on azilink, which works by running a vpn tunnel through your phone. But azilink is strongly biased towards Windows users, to the point that the author says "if you're using linux, or god forbid, OS X..." in his directions. And the preferred client for azilink, OpenVPN 2, is a headache to install directly on OS X (you can install Macports or build it by hand from source, but that's a nonstarter for most users).
That said, with a little setup work, you can get everything to tether by running one shell script. I assume you know your way around a BASH prompt here (if you don't, this is decidedly not the right solution for you).
- - Enable USB debugging and 3rd-party app installation (System Settings -> Applications -> check Unknown Sources; Development -> check USB debugging).
- - Install azilink on the phone.
- - Install the Android SDK to get the adb tool
- - Either add the SDK's tools folder to your PATH or copy adb to /usr/local/bin/
- - Install Tunnelblick, a nice OS X VPN GUI that runs on OpenVPN2. Just copy it to your Applications folder, and run it to set up your system. (I used Tunnelblick 3.0b22).
- - Get the activate/deactivate shell script from #701122 - Pastie and save it as, for example, ~/azilink.sh
- - Make the script runnable (e.g. "chmod 744 ~/azilink.sh" at the Terminal)
Phew! But once that initial setup is done, all you have to do to tether your phone is:
- - Run azilink on the phone and check the box to start the service.
- - Run the script ("~/azilink.sh") on your Mac from Terminal.
To make it even easier in the future: Right-click the shell script in the Finder, choose Get Info, and Open With -> Applications/Utilities/Terminal (DON'T apply that to all; that could be risky). Then you can run the script by just double-clicking it in the Finder without having to go through manually starting a Terminal session.
That pre-first-run setup's a bit of a hassle, but it should be *much* more friendly on the batteries than BT or Wifi-based solutions, and this runs using entirely free open-source tools.
Big thanks to Mochabyte on the xda-developers Dream forum for doing most of the hard work; I just streamlined the process to not require macports and openvpn2 from source, and added (hopefully) straightforward directions for the whole setup process.