vodafone au prepaid mobile broadband on linux

I recently purchased a Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband USB stick but had some trouble getting it to work with Ubuntu 9.0.4

The secret sauce is to download the latest packages from here, configure the Vodafone Australia Pre-paid Mobile Broadband profile, then edit the profile and change the APN from vfinternet.au to vfprepaymbb

The rationale for the change is that this APN is what the Mac OSX build on the USB stick itself chooses to use - as revealed by appropriate logs.

I have raised a bug report on the VMC site to have this rolled into a future release of the Linux build.

BTW: with Ubuntu 9.0.4, it isn't strictly necessary to install VMC. You do, however, have to configure the APN in the connections manager per the discovery above (e.g. vfprepaymbb). The advantage of doing it this way, is that the connection plays nice with the Network Manager application and other applications which are integrated with it (like Firefox). The disadvantage is that you don't automatically get an SMS send receive + usage monitor application which is what VMC provides.