Network from laptop to Android device over USB

If you're running an Android device with GNU userland Linux in a chroot and need a full network access over USB cable (so that you can use your laptop/desktop machine's network connection from the device), here's a quick primer on how it can be set up.

When doing Openmoko hacking, one always first plugged in the USB cable and forwarded network, or like I did later forwarded network over Bluetooth. It was mostly because the WiFi was quite unstable with many of the kernels.

I recently found out myself using a chroot on a Nexus 4 without working WiFi, so instead of my usual WiFi usage I needed network over USB... trivial, of course, except that there's Android on the way and I'm a Android newbie. Thanks to ZDmitry on Freenode, I got the bits for the Android part so I got it working.

On device, have eg. data/usb.sh with the following contents.

#!/system/xbin/sh
CHROOT="/data/chroot"

ip addr add 192.168.137.2/30 dev usb0
ip link set usb0 up
ip route delete default
ip route add default via 192.168.137.1;
setprop net.dns1 8.8.8.8
echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> $CHROOT/run/resolvconf/resolv.conf

On the host, execute the following:

adb shell setprop sys.usb.config rndis,adb
adb shell data/usb.sh
sudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.137.1
sudo iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.137.0/24
echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward 
sudo iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

This works at least with Ubuntu saucy chroot. The main difference in some other distro might be whether the resolv.conf has moved to /run or not. You should be now all set up to browse / apt-get stuff from the device again.

Update: Clarified that this is to forward the desktop/laptop's network connection to the device so that network is accessible from the device over USB.
Update2, 09/2013: It's also possible to get working on the newer flipped images. Remove the "$CHROOT" from nameserver echoing and it should be fine. With small testing it got somehow reset after a while at which point another run of data/usb.sh on the device restored connection.