Motorola Droid USB Tethering

I found out today (the hard way) that the new tether option included with the Android 2.2 update doesn't actually do anything. Maybe there's a fee I can pay Verizon to make it so, but that's not happening.

In my research to find out how to make the tethering feature work, I discovered a method of tethering I'd not heard of before (and apparently it's been around awhile.)

You don't have you root your phone AND it's completely free. Win win right? It just takes a little bit of configuration on your computer. For this post I'm going to focus on OSX because that's what I use, and there seem to be a plethora of others out there explaining how this works in Windows.

I used this guy's blog as a basis for what I did, and I changed very little: http://jimcortez.com/blog/?p=37

His first step is to install openvpn on your Mac. I already had Viscosity installed on mine and I wanted to try and use it instead of installing a separate openvpn client and using the custom script provided. This method instead allows you to use the Viscosity icon on your menu bar to initiate your tether. It's cleaner in my opinion and allows me to use one central location to initialize the tether and then my work vpn.

For this method you need only follow a fraction of the steps provided from the blog above.

1. First, install Viscosity. You can find it here.
2. Install Azilink to your phone. Instead of going through the trouble of installing the SDK, I find it's easier to just install it directly on your phone from a web browser.

On your phone do the following:

• Menu->Settings->Applications->Check the "Unknown Sources" box.
• Install "Astro File Manager" from the Marketplace
• Open Astro->Menu->More->Preferences->Check the "Enable Browser Download" box.
• (Remember to uncheck that same box when you've finished downloading things from the web...that feature can break your ability to view attachments in Gmail)
• Download Azilink here.
• Open Astro and browse to your download directory. Clicking on the file should give you the option to install it (if you've followed the previous directions properly.)
  

3. Now run Azilink and check the "Service Started" box to make sure it's enabled.
4. Enable USB Debugging: Settings->Applications->Development->USB debugging
5. Create a file with these contents:

#viscosity startonopen false
#viscosity dhcp true
#viscosity dnssupport true
#viscosity name azilink
remote 127.0.0.1 41927
ping 10
dev tun
proto tcp-client
route 0.0.0.0 128.0.0.0
route 128.0.0.0 128.0.0.0
socket-flags TCP_NODELAY
dhcp-option DNS 192.168.56.1
script-security 2
ifconfig 192.168.56.2 192.168.56.1

5. Make sure Viscosity is running and click on the menu icon for it and go to Preferences.
6. Click on the plus (+) icon and then Import the file you just created.
7. Now click on the azilink entry that you just created and then Edit
8. Under "Certificates" choose "Static Key" (You get a weird error about a missing certificate if you don't do this.)

Now connect tether your phone to your laptop, and click on the Viscosity icon and then "Connect azilink."

If everything went according to plan, you should be surfing the inter-tubes now :)