Userland PPP on ADSL

[O'Connor, Daniel]

Hi,
I have several FreeBSD machines setup as routers connected to ADSL modems in bridge mode. ie the FreeBSD box terminates the PPP connection and the ADSL modem doesn't do much.

This worked well for many moons but a while ago I found issues with the inbuilt PPP and ended up switching to mpd5 which has so far worked flawlessly.

I was wondering if anyone else had also seen similar issues?

In my experience PPP will hang for a long time when the ADSL link goes down. It does seem to eventually come back (minutes later) but while it's stuck it will only exit with kill -9.

This wouldn't be such a big deal but the rc.d script doesn't actually check if the PPP process exits so a naive monitoring script that does 'service ppp restart' will end up with 2 processes which usually screws up firewall rules. There are ways around this (eg have the script check, or set ppp_unit) but it seems like a bug.

The only log messages I see are..
May  8 12:27:53 portero ppp[76165]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendEchoReply(114) state = Opened
May  8 12:27:54 portero ppp[76165]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendEchoRequest(38) state = Opened
May  8 12:27:54 portero ppp[76165]: tun0: LCP: deflink: RecvEchoReply(38) state = Opened
May  8 12:28:54 portero ppp[76165]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendEchoRequest(39) state = Opened
May  8 12:29:54 portero ppp[76165]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendEchoRequest(40) state = Opened

Does anyone have any suggestions where to start looking? It would be nice if the base tool worked properly for what I feel is a not uncommon scenario :)

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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