rp-pppoe/initscripts/broken PPPoE annoyance

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 21:31 +0300, Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> Hiya
> 
> I'm wondering if I'm the only one annoyed by rp-pppoe (#134923)/udev
> (#131114)/whatnot bug of the day/provider flakyness that makes the system
> get stuck on boot while trying to get PPPoE up. (sysrq kill-everything or
> booting in interactive mode and skipping networking fortunately gets around
> this so whatever was the problem can be repaired)
>
> What's especially evil is that this happens before syslogd is up ->
> no useful debug output on the console. 
> 
> Not sure what the proper solution would be or whether this even is a bug
> (the bugs that have triggered this behaviour for me are fixed, sure).
> 
> A simple workaround is just using ONBOOT=no and putting "ifup
> <interface> &" in rc.local. Other options would be to have an option for
> ifuping interfaces in the background (some distros apparently do this),
> another to change adsl-start to try a few times and if it still fails
> either give up or continue trying in the backgruond.
> 
> Comments? 

I use demand mode. It creates the interface, gives the local IP address
so dæmons can bind to it immediately, and gets on with booting. When the
DSL modem has finished synchronising and the line comes up, it
eventually starts actually passing traffic. It seems to work flawlessly
for me.

I assume you're not using demand mode, and that it makes you wait while
it brings up the interface? If you _want_ it to happen in the background
though, and you don't actually need it up instantly (for stuff like
ntpdate) then surely you should be?

I think I'm going to implement a 'permanent demand' mode for pppd which
works like demand mode but it _always_ assumes there's a demand. I have
to be careful though because I already sent Paulus the pppoatm stuff,
and I also want to implement an 'ifname' option so we can rename the
'ppp0' netdevice to match the pretty device name. If I send too many
patches in quick succession I may end up lumbered with maintenance :)

-- 
dwmw2