Re: [Bluez-users] Confessions of an ignoramus - what is all this PIN stuff?

Timothy Murphy
2004-08-27T09:59:04Z

On Thursday 26 August 2004 21:20, Steven Singer wrote:

> > I find this PIN business very hard to follow.
> > Is there a simple account somewhere?
> > (Please don't refer me to the Bluetooth Spec
> > which I find more or less unintelligble.)
>
> Every Bluetooth device has a unique address. As has been noted on this
> mailing list, addresses can be faked.

Thanks, I found that very helpful.

> > I have two laptops, martha and william (my grandparents).
> > I first linked to my Nokia 6310 with martha.
> > For some reason the phone thinks william is also martha.
> > Is this something to do with the fact that I always use the same PIN?
>
> More likely it's to do with you using the same dongle for both PCs. The
> phone probably read the name stored in the dongle once and has cached
> it. On subsequent occasions when it sees the same device (that is, when
> it has a connection from the same Bluetooth address), it's not bothering
> to read the name, it's just displaying the cached name.

In fact, these are two almost identical laptops with built-in bluetooth.
They have different BT addresses.
I think what must have happened is that at some point in the past
I copied /etc/bluetooth from one to the other.
(I had to replace the hard disk on one.)

Which raises one very minor point -
how can one force two devices to re-pair?

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland