How to mount your phone as a file system with irda

Forum: DSL Tips and Tricks
Topic: How to mount your phone as a file system with irda
started by: Juanito

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 26 2007,11:06

I had hoped to be able to mount a mobile phone file system on DSL using fuse/obexfs but I have been unable to compile obexfs and "apt-get install obexfs" from Debian testing does not work either (perhaps not a surprise as DSL is based on Debian oldstable).

For the alternate solution to work, Network File Systems (NFS) needs to be enabled - which it is in DSL - and the NFS modules loaded.

You will need to visit < http://www.koeniglich.de/p3nfs.html > and download two files:

1. p3nfs-5.19.tar.gz
2. One of the *.sis files corresponding to your mobile phone

Note that I believe this solution may only work on Symbian phones. Once you have the files, p3nfs-5.19 needs to be compiled on DSL (I will post p3nfs.dsl soon) and the *.sis file needs to be copied to your phone and installed.

Once that is done, we are ready to set things up - make sure irda is enabled on your phone and in the "pc-connect" mode. The *.sis application needs to be started on your phone and toggled to irda (there are also bluetooth and tcp/ip options).

# modprobe nfs
# modprobe nfsd
# portmap start [required for p3nfs]
# mkdir /mnt/phone
# p3nfsd -UIQ -tty /dev/ircomm0 -dir /mnt/phone
p3nfsd: version 5.19, using /dev/ircomm0 (115200), mounting on /mnt/phone
p3nfsd: to stop the server do "ls /mnt/phone/exit". (pid 6897)

# ls /mnt/phone/D:/eBooks
OUPEnglishFrenchPoc66E0545B.mbp OUPFrenchEnglishPoc76ABB795.mbp rippleeffectthe4D6F37970.mbp
OUPEnglishFrenchPoc66E0545B.prc OUPFrenchEnglishPoc76ABB795.prc rippleeffectthe4D6F37970.prc

# ls /mnt/phone/exit
ls: /mnt/phone/exit: File exists
# p3nfsd: exiting.

Once the connection is made, you can copy files from/to DSL using emelFM. Note that if the file name has a space in it, you will need to include the name in single quotes, eg '/mnt/phone/C:/documents/Media files/'

The connection is not that fast (I have been unable to get irda working in the 4Mb FIR mode under DSL - FIR works fine under DSL-N) but is OK for smallish files.

Finally, a word of warning - take care which files you delete on your phone, you could easily render it inoperable...