Making hcitool commands work

It's a shame how some now-ubiquitous technologies, like Bluetooth, are under-used and under-understood. And by usage I don't mean here occasional business card exchange, net access, being bluesnarfed and other boring consumer-level activity, but page scans, inquiries and having secure wireless communication you can trust (or not).

Anyway, if you ever tried using hcitool you may think it barely works. For example:


# hcitool cc <bdaddr>
# hcitool lq <bdaddr>
Not connected.


Ok, so here's the matter. First of all, hcitool accesses hci device directly, and that requires root access. Secondly, it works on low protocol level (ACL), so connection established by "cc" is of course not pairing or service-level connection. It's low level connection, which persist only while data is transferred and shutdown quickly to preserve the power. Yep, it shuts down while you type or even re-run next command. That's how it should be done:


# hcitool cc <bdaddr>; hcitool lq <bdaddr>
Link quality: 255


More fun:


# hcitool cc $BDADDR; hcitool auth $BDADDR; hcitool enc $BDADDR; hcitool key $BDADDR; hcitool con
Connections:
< ACL 7D:75:75:xx:xx:xx handle 12 state 1 lm MASTER AUTH ENCRYPT SECURE