A weird thing is happening to my pppd. (version 2.2.0f-19) I added the persist option to /etc/ppp/options so that if the connection went down, it would immediately be brought back up again. However what happens is it attempts to dial and then stops short. It does this about three times and then stops. I thought maybe the modem wasn't re-initializing properly (It's a rather old AT&T DataExpress 28.8) so I went to my chat script and added ath,at&f before the dial string. ath should hang up my modem and at&f should reinitialize it. I have checked these commands with the modem manual. This didn't work either. In fact I was unable to use pppd until I rebooted. (yes even stopping it and starting it again didn't work.) The odd thing was I could redial with minicom. So there is something wrong with pppd or my setup of it.
The immediate emergency is gone. I have found a small program called pppupd which can watch the connection and bring it back up again if needed. This seems to be able to redial without any problems. Still I'd like to get to the bottom of the ppp problem if anyone has any ideas. -- Jaldhar
