Verizon Mifi stopped working in tether mode

Had a lengthy discussion with Verizon Technical Support today. According to my tech support contact, Verizon has been aware of the problem for about 10 days, and understands that the necessary fix would be an updated driver for that device. As this time they had no time frame for when that might be happening.

I know EXACTLY what the problem is and it can not currently be solved. I also can not find my review on the App Store which detailed the problem. I must use tethering mode at work because WIFI is literally blocked by our security devices. In a nutshell, El Capitan implemented strong security for Kernel Extensions. This means that un-signed kernel extensions will be blocked from loading. The Novatel device is one. Interestingly enough, I found that Apple white listed the USB driver but not the Modem driver. If you try to load them independently using kextutil, you will get the Exact error message saying that OSX is blocking the loading of the driver. I tried to enable boot options to load the drivers, which also did not work (kext-dev-mode=1 and rootless=0). Neither worked. Here are all the support resources I talked to in order to NOT resolve this:

1) Verizon technical phone support

2) Verizon store

3) Apple technical phone support

4) Apple Genius Bar

5) Novatel Technical support

I tried a new MIFI modem to see if that worked (the new Verizon Netgear model is fantastic) - except that tethering is no longer supported for Mac with the newest VZW devices. So that did not work in tethering mode.

In a nutshell, its a Novatel driver issue as well as an Apple security 'feature'. If Novatel signed their drivers, it would load. If Apple added it to the white list, it would load. Apple had no answer. Verizon pointed to Novatel. Novatel said "this would take a long time to do and test".

My only option was to revert to Yosemite. Which also caused problems because by the time I figured out what was going on, my time machine backups were backing up El Capitan. So NOW, I could not do a restore from Time Machine because:

1) The rescue time machine restore would end up freezing at the 50% mark after reboot.

2) A fresh install of Yosemite would not allow restore from a 'newer' OS backup. I tried to move the El Capitan backups off my time machine device and that did not work.

My solutions was:

0) Get/Create a Yosemite USB stick

1) Rescue mode time machine restore from a known Yosemite time/date backup

2) Reboot and wait for the system to hang at 50% (yes I tried NVRAM resets)

3) Restart into the Yosemite installer and install the OS (surprisingly, this does NOT overwrite the restored data!! but did fix the boot issue)

4) This caused Photos to be missing so I had to install an Apple "MAC OSX 10.8.5 Client Combo Update" which restored the application

5) Fix/tweak/upgrade software and configurations as you discover them

6) Full time machine backup (hopefully this "reverts" Time Machine so its usable with Yosemite again)

Now that I'm back in Yosemite everything works again. Finally. There was literally no way I could get the Novatel drivers to load in El Capitan.

Verizon sent me this http://production.620.verizon.mifiupdates.com/Mac/MiFiModeSwitch_Mac.zip It enables Ethernet support, the device is now fully functional. Remember to unplug the device before installing.

This is VERY helpful. After installing this utility the device works as intended. One thing to note, if you use network locations, the device will only show up on one location. Thanks, Rad!!!

ok, so almost everything here works as expected.

However, the 'modeselect' utility provided with the above zipfile coredumps all over the place on my mac:

• OS X 10.11.6
• Macbook Pro (Retina, Mid 2015)

So, after a lot of digging around, I was able to plugin the device on a linux box, and use the installed 'usb_modeswitch' it failed also (although with a nicer error message):

# usb_modeswitch -v 0x1410 -p 0x9020 -u 2

Looking for default devices ...

found matching product ID

Getting the current device configuration ...

OK, got current device configuration (1)

Found device in default mode, class or configuration (1)

Accessing device 006 on bus 004 ...

Getting the current device configuration ...

OK, got current device configuration (1)

Using interface number 0

Error: message endpoint not given or found. Aborting.

So, I proceeded to follow these instructions:

http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/bb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2393&start=0

And, on Linux, using this command successfully puts the device into 'Ethernet Mode':

# echo 2 /sys/bus/usb/devices X-Y-Z/bConfigurationValue

You can find the values for X-Y-Z with:

# lsusb|grep -i nova

Bus 00X Device 00Y: ID 1410:9020 Novatel Wireless

Although this is an easier method:

# dmesg -H

And then scroll down until you see the Novatel section, similar to this:

[ +16.560733] usb 4-1.7: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci

[ +0.115107] usb 4-1.7: New USB device found, idVendor=1410, idProduct=9020

[ +0.000005] usb 4-1.7: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3

[ +0.000003] usb 4-1.7: Product: MiFi USB620L

[ +0.000002] usb 4-1.7: Manufacturer: Novatel Wireless

[ +0.000002] usb 4-1.7: SerialNumber: ABCDEF

So, I thought I was done, but no, Mac OS X has no such mechanism to 'poke' values into /sys/bus/...

And the modeslect provided with the tool above coredumps.

So, I am back to the start, and have no solution for Mac OS X.

But, I didn't give up quite yet:

I remembered that I have installed macports, and have libusb1.0.0 from that.

Unrelated to this thread, I highly recommend macports for any serious Mac Developers.

For more details on macports, go here:

https://www.macports.org/

So, now I dig out the source code for 'usb-modeselect', available from here:

http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/

Compiling this took a bit of fiddling around with the 'Makefile'.

Just change the 'Makefile' as below:

# diff Makefile Makefile.ORIG

3c3

< CC = gcc

---

> CC ?= gcc

# make

sed 's_!/usr/bin/tclsh_!'"/opt/local/src/usb-modeswitch-2.4.0/jim /usr/bin/tclsh"'_' < usb_modeswitch.tcl > usb_modeswitch_dispatcher

You can safely ignore the weird response from the make command.

The important thing is you now have a usable 'usb_modeswitch' command for OS X!

Now, this is probably enough for most people's use, you can make a little script of your own, that you run every time that you plugin the device:

./usb_modeswitch -p 9020 -v 1410 -u 2

Look for default devices ...

product ID matched

Get the current device configuration ...

Found devices in default mode (1)

Access device 012 on bus 020

Get the current device configuration ...

Current configuration number is 1

Use interface number 0

USB description data (for identification)

-------------------------

Manufacturer: Novatel Wireless

Product: MiFi USB620L

Serial No.: 0123456789ABCDEF

-------------------------

Change configuration to 2 ...

OK, configuration set

Get the current device configuration ...

The configuration was set successfully

-> Run lsusb to note any changes. Bye!

I went a bit further than this, but the steps I gave you above are enough for most uses.