auto restarting a ppp connection

[Paul Hamilton]

Hi All,

I am running FreeBSD 4.7, and using the built in ppp (and ppp nat), software
to make a pppoe connection.

Once or twice a month my ISP does something that causes my connection to be
blocked.
The only way to fix this is to kill the ppp connection and re-start it.  I
have tried
to put the whole routine into a script, ie, find the pid, kill it, wait,
then restart the
ppp connection.  The idea, was that I could link it with a ping tester, then
when I miss
'x' number of pings, restart the connection.  This is what I used:-

--snip---

PPP=`ps -ax | grep "ppp -nat" | grep -v "grep" | cut -c 1-6`
if test $PPP
#if test $PPP != ""
 then
   kill -15 $PPP
   echo Wait for 5 seconds to properly kill the old PPP process
   printf "%s"  "."
   sleep 1
   printf "%s"  "."
   sleep 1
   printf "%s"  "."
   sleep 1
   printf "%s"  "."
   sleep 1
   printf "%s"  "."
   sleep 1
   printf "%s\n"  "."
   sleep 1
 else
   echo
   echo No PPP process found to kill
fi
---snip---

I found that my script had problems with killing the ppp pid, in that it
didn't really kill the ppp process, until the script had exited.

My question is, is there a port/package that will automatically look after a
FreeBSD ppp link?  If so, what are your experiences, with the best one?

Cheers,

Paul Hamilton