ppp instabilities?

[Cordula's Web]

> My system is
> FreeBSD pukruppa.net 5.2-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT
> #0: Wed Apr 28 23:06:14 CEST 2004 .
> 
> I am running userland ppp with -nat and -ddial options to connect
> to my DSL/Internet Service Providers (T-Kom and kamp-dsl in
> Germany, via PPPoE).
> 
> During the last four or five weeks my connection went down very
> often and didn't start again - which should be granted by -ddial.
> My providers of course swear this isn't their fault and of course
> my DSL bridge or my NIC might be defect some way.
> Usually I can restart my connection by rebooting my machine.

This typically happens when your ISP switches equipment (or
simply reloads your peer router. For a strange reason,
ppp doesn't notice that the PAD session is dead, and
therefore doesn't try to reconnect.

You have two options here:

1. Log into ppp (pppctl /var/run/internet), and at the
   PPP prompt, issue a close command. ppp will notice
   and will shutdown the connection. If you used -ddial,
   it will try to reestablish the connection by its own [*]

2. Fix the code in ppp (or ng_pppoe?) so that it doesn't
   depend only upon PADS keep-alives [**].

Notes:

[*] Some routers need a lot of time to come back online.
    You may need anytime from 1 minute to 30 minutes or so,
    just tail -f /var/log/ppp.log  in the meantime

[**] Many ADSL ISPs peer with DSL providers. The DSL
     provider's DSLAM equipment may be still okay
     and send PADS confirmations when asked by ppp,
     but the ISPs router may not be ready. When the
     ISPs router comes back online, it will happily
     disregard those dead ADSL sessions. Argh...

BTW, I'm not speculating here. I've confirmed thrice with my
ISPs that they rebooted my peer router exactly when ppp
behaved as you've just described.

> My ppp configs should be okay: I am using them for more than a
> year now without any problems.
> 
> So here my two questions:
> 1) Does anyone else see this behavior on -CURRENT?
> 2) Are there any logs or tools I can use to analyze this
>    behaviour?
> 
> 
> Thanks for all hints,
> 
> Uli.
> 
> 	+---------------------------+
> 	|    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
>         |         Wuppertal         |
>         |          Germany          |
>         +---------------------------+

Cheers,
-cpghost.

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