pppd crashes, was: kde-freebsd

[Christopher Sean Hilton]

On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 03:06 +0100, Michael Nottebrock wrote:

[ snip ]

> All that your "bug report" accomplishes is broadcasting your bad and 
> uninformed attitude to an even bigger audience. It is in your own and the 
> FreeBSD community's best interest to backtrack before anyone gets to form a 
> negative opinion on both.

I just took a look at the list of bugs in pppd. Aside from being
unmaintained it looks as though the functionality is still okay. This is
borne out my experience using pppd with my wireless modem. Just last
night on a trip from JFK in fact.

Opinion is getting more important with the market arrival of affordable
EVDO coverage and cards. EVDO is a wireless technology for connecting to
the net. The connection speeds are between 700 ~ 3000 kb/s I nearly
passed on the opportunity to get one card due to reports that FreeBSD
6.1 and 6.2 had rendered kernel ppp unusable. In the current generation
these cards are very fast serial modems that connect to the USB bus.
They configure exactly like a serial connected modem and ppp stack. They
are primarily configured for windows but configurations for kernel pppd
primarily for Linux and Mac OSX are readily available on the Internet. 

The argument for EVDO cards also holds for bluetooth enabled phones.
With Verizon and Sprint allowing you to use the bluetooth stack in your
phone to connect to the Internet at EVDO speeds for a nominal fee, we
should expect more people and try to use FreeBSD in this manner. When
they do they will com from Linux with a kernel pppd configuration. 

-- Chris