After weeks of happily using my Motorola v710 phone and a DLink DBT-120 Bluetooth USB to wirelessly connect my G4 PowerBook to the internet, it stopped working. Everything described here happened while running Tiger. I was presented with a dialog box with the following disconcerting message:
Internet Connect
The selected communication device does not exist.
Please verify your settings and try again.
At this point, I took a look at system.log using Console, and found the following error being reported:
Jul 25 09:33:44 hostname pppd[3343]:
Device '/dev/cu.Bluetooth-Modem' does not exist
Sure enough, no such entry exists under /dev. After repeatedly rediscoving the phone and fiddling with my connection configurations, I continued to get the same message. Apple Support was happy to talk about Tiger, but informed me that Bluetooth network connections are not supported (grumble, grumble). Fortunately, I have a second machine which I had also set up to use my Bluetooth phone for a network connection (though it has an Apple internal Bluetooth module instead of the USB style on my Powerbook). I took a look at the Bluetooth entries under /dev on my still working machine using ls -l /dev/*Blue*. I then created identical entries on my Powerbook using these commands:
sudo mknod /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync c 9 2
sudo mknod /dev/cu.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync c 9 3
sudo mknod /dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem c 9 4
sudo mknod /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Modem c 9 5
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/*Blue*
Now all seems fine. I have no idea what could have caused this problem, nor do I know the proper way to recreate the /dev entries expected by Tiger. Additional insight into possible causes of this problem or the appropriateness of the solution would be appreciated...

