ppp and active-filter issues

[Bruno Wolff III]

I had two problems with ppp while trying to make the idle timeout only
count outbound packets.

The first is that when I run pppd with an 'outbound' filter I get the
error message:
pppd: error in active-filter expression: inbound/outbound not supported on linktype 0

This makes it seem like it is checking the link type before the link is
set up and so it 'outbound' isn't a valid filter rule because it is only
valid for ppp and slip links.

The second problem was that I was using the options tab of the network
configuration tool to add the option (as opposed to editing the appropiate
config file directly) and I found that when I deleted the option (so
that I could activate my ppp link) it didn't remove the option from the
config file. I had to go in and manually remove it from the config file.

There is probably a way to make another test that will work, but since
my ip address is dynamic it isn't obvious.

Without an active-filter the idle timeout feature is useless since my
system gets probed much more frequently than what I want to use for a timeout.