Enabling Bluetooth discoverability upon start-up

Question

I would like to make a USB Bluetooth dongle discoverable upon start-up (or whenever it's plugged in) on Debian Squeeze or Wheezy.

If I use hciconfig initially, I can see the device in this mode:

    UP RUNNING PSCAN

Using hciconfig hci0 piscan manually works fine. This puts the device in this mode (and the device can be discovered):

    UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN

A number of documents (for example, on the Debian wiki or this Ubuntu issue) point to settings in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf. It would seem that setting iscan enable; pscan enable; in this file should work. Unfortunately, the versions of Bluez I'm using (4.x) don't have this file (even with the bluez-compat package installed).

/etc/bluetooth/main.conf says:

# How long to stay in discoverable mode before going back to non-discoverable
# The value is in seconds. Default is 180, i.e. 3 minutes.
# 0 = disable timer, i.e. stay discoverable forever
DiscoverableTimeout = 0

This doesn't work, though. The device starts up in PSCAN mode, but not PSCAN ISCAN.

Even manually, the following command taken from the Debian wiki doesn't work:

dbus-send --system --dest=org.bluez /org/bluez/hci0 org.bluez.Adapter.SetMode string:discoverable

Is there a recommended way to set the device in PSCAN ISCAN mode upon start-up (or when the dongle is inserted)?

Solution

You could try this:

Add the bash command hciconfig hci0 piscan in the /etc/rc.local (before the last line of "exit 0").

Note: any bash command you add to the /etc/rc.local will execute without the environment variables being loaded yet. So used absolute paths!

Comments

[Bruno]

Sorry about the delay, I hadn't noticed the answers... As I was saying in the question, I can do that manually and it works, I was looking for something more dynamic in terms of configuration.

[Bruno]

Sorry about the delay, I hadn't noticed the answers... That would work fine upon start-up, but not if you plug in the USB dongle later.

[Alex]

Sorry, a bit late, probably a udev rule would have solved.

[wojciii]

I was expecting the following udev rule to work: ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="hci1", RUN+="/usr/sbin/hciconfig hci1 piscan; /usr/sbin/hciconfig hci1 name LubaLuft1" with USB bluetooth devices but it was executed and had no effect. I think that an upstart job is required (or similar (I'm using Ubuntu)).