Jul

25

Mounting a Nokia Phone a Little Bit Easier

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I have been using p3nfs to mount my Nokia 9300 and later the E70, and it has worked pretty well. However, all this time the fuse and bluez hackers and Nokia’s open source team have been busy behind my back and provide a couple of alternative solutions.

The easier of these is using fuse and obexfs. I initially found this tip on Google Groups, and later David’s more thorough HOWTO. Here’s the drill:

  • Find out your phone’s Bluetooth MAC address if you don’t know it already:
    hcitool scan
  • Find out the OBEX FTP channel it uses
    sdptool search FTP
  • Load the fuse kernel module:
    sudo modprobe fuse
  • Make a suitable mount point for your phone:
    mkdir ~/Phone
  • Mount
    obexfs -bXX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX -BYY ~/Phone
    (where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is your phone’s MAC and YY is the OBEX channel)
  • Unmount when you’re done with your file transfers:
    fusermount -u ~/Phone

That’s it!

Mounting via Bluetooth and Browsing via Web
Image: Browsing my phone via Bluetooth,
WebDAV and a Web browser

The other method is more exciting and far more geeky. It doesn’t actually involve mounting your phone’s filesystem at all, but making its contents available by running a web server on it. I’ve known about Nokia’s mobile Web server for some time already, but was inspired to try it out recently by Mikko‘s comment on a blog entry of mine involving phone/linux synchronizing.

You can selectively make all your phone’s information available on the Web for yourself, for a group of friends, or globally. Register on mymobilesite.net, download the Mobile Server software, and away you go. It works very well, but eats far too much RAM to be running permanently at this stage (it’s advertised as beta). For temporary access it’s a viable solution though, and here’s the strong point: no setup is needed on the receiving side, all you need is a computer and a Web browser! I will certainly keep an eye on the server’s development and play with it more in the weeks and months to come.

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