pppoe connection freezes

[Andy Balholm]

I have CenturyLink DSL, and I use the user-space ppp program in FreeBSD 9.1 to make the PPPoE connection. From time to time (every few days) the connection freezes up—no more data can be sent or received. No error shows up in ppp.log; all I can see there is that there are no more RecvEchoRequest and SendEchoReply entries after the connection freezes. If I send SIGINT to the ppp program, it reconnects just fine.

I talked to CenturyLink's tech support, and they said that one of the times that I had a problem, the connection was dropped on their end, but the others it was fine.

My ppp command line is
ppp -nat -ddial centurylink

My ppp.conf:

default:
 set log Phase Chat LCP IPCP CCP tun command
 disable ipv6cp

centurylink:
 set device PPPoE:rl0
 enable lqr
 set authname balholmandrew at qwest.net
 set authkey ########
 set dial
 set login
 add default HISADDR

Is there a setting I can add to ppp.conf to make it detect when the connection freezes? Or is there something else that I need to fix?

Andy Balholm
(509) 276-2065
andy at balholm.com