Re: [libimobiledevice-devel] ipheth

["Martin S." <info@sukimashita.com>]

On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 14:30 +0100, Paul McEnery wrote:
> On 1 April 2010 14:07, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> > Paul,
> >
> > I missed you talking about ipheth on IRC earlier.
> >
> > I've seen the submission of ipheth on the netdev mailing list, and made
> > some comments on it there.  If it is accepted, we can include it in the
> > Debian kernel packages and there will then be no need for ipheth-dkms.
> > You'll still need ipheth-utils.  As for the udev rules, what do they do?
> >
> 
> Hi Ben.
> 
> The udev rules detect when an iPhone has been plugged in and execute a
> utility (ipheth-pair) which ensures that the iPhone is paired with the
> system to which it has been attached. Ipheth-pair is a small program
> written in C which makes use of libimobiledevice. Essentially
> ipheth-utils provides provides only the udev rules file and
> ipheth-pair utility. Ipheth-dkms provides the kernel module source
> code...
> 
> So I'm guessing that ipheth-utils could be a package which is
> maintained long-term once ipheth is included in the mainstream kernel,
> or...
> 
> Would it be more sensible to have libimobiledevice provide a generic
> pairing utility and set of udev rules which execute it when an
> i<device> is attached? Possibly part of libimobiledevice-utils? This
> appears to be a cleaner solution than maintaining a separate package
> for the task.
> 
> Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

Afaik. running any tool from libimobiledevice tools has the same effect
(for instance ideviceinfo). Those will pair a previously unpaired device
on the fly, too.

Only issue to take care of is that password protected devices that pair
for the first time with the host computer need their password disabled
in order for the initial pairing to succeed.

Additionally, I recently pushed a flag into the usbmuxd udev rules named
"USBMUX_SUPPORTED" which dependent rules can use to detect devices
supporting the usbmux protocol without having to maintain any usb id
ranges which clearly belong into usbmuxd.

If you like we can create a simple "idevicepair" tool to allow cli based
manual pairing, unpairing and managing pairing records on the host.

Besides that, the only thing I would add for discussion is to question
the need for a kernel driver since I have seen someone on the libiphone
ML did implement all the tethering stuff in user-space.

--- Martin S.