[Freedombox-discuss] Plinth 0.12 anomalies, and NM still can't start ppp, firewall issue?

[A. F. Cano]

FreedomBox stretch/sid (testing) with Plinth 0.12 on an APU1D4.

I keep trying different things and I still can't get network manager to start
ppp automatically like it used to.  Furthermore there are now anomalies in
what Plinth reports.

When displaying the WAN connection, plinth reports:

Link state	please check cable
Speed		0 Mbit/s

This used to be correct in plinth 0.10.  Of course the cable is plugged in
and I can access the wifi router connected to that interface (ping and via
the http interface).  This connection is set to "manual" (static IP address)
and is not in use since the wifi router in question is not connected to a
wifi network.

When I plug the cdma phone into the usb interface, network manager fails
to set up the connection.  This used to work before december 30 or so when
network manager got upgraded.  Now I'm wondering if this has to do with
firewall settings:

Jan  9 21:24:53 fbx NetworkManager[379]: <warn>  [1484015093.0324] firewall: [0x55b1802df440,remove:"ttyACM0"]: complete: request failed (UNKNOWN_INTERFACE: 'ttyACM0' is not in any zone)
Jan  9 21:25:56 fbx NetworkManager[379]: <warn>  [1484015155.9917] modem-broadband[ttyACM0]: failed to connect modem: Network timeout

The networks page shows the ppp interface as active (in green) but ifconfig
doesn't show it.  At other times it shows it as inactive and activating it
via the networks page returns: "Failed to activate connection ppp: No
suitable device is available."

By the way, it would be nice to have an option "cdma" to create an interface
of this type in plinth.  The ppp connection had to be created with nmcli and
worked fine before december 30.  There is a thread in the archives about how
I had to set it up manually.

If I start ppp with "sudo pon cell" via ssh, it works fine.

If I click diagnostics on the networks page, it shows tcp and udp on the
internal network as "passed" but doesn't show the WAN or ppp connections.

Any hints about what to check/test?  Thanks.

Augustine