

This is to work around problems seen from the sympatico Access
Concentrator. It has a tendency to "kill uncleanly". They
detect periods of inactivity from your side and kill their
session without sending you LCP disconnection messages. Very Bad(tm).

By default, pppoed will not detect such situations. 
You can change this by:
1) uncommenting the three lines in the example options file
lcp-echo-interval 60
lcp-echo-failure 3
nodetach

The nodetach option is a necessary evil for now, until i have time
to do it better (or someone else does it -- send me a patch!) . 
When you start pppoed, the terminal on which you started
becomes unusable for anything else. If you turn on the debug option,
it should actualy spew progress logs. Dont turn it on if you wish
for just minimal logging on that terminal. 
WARNING: If you try to move pppoed to the background, you loose
the ability to restart pppoed.


* the lcp-echo-interval tells pppd to send an LCP echo-request frame 
to the  ISP  every  n  seconds. In the example above, every 60
seconds (every minute). You can think of the LCP echo-request
as a low level PPP ping. I think 60 seconds is a little too frequent;
i set mine to 240 seconds; your mileage may vary.

* lcp-echo-failure works with the lcp-echo-interval and tells pppd
to kill pppd if n LCP echo-requests are sent without receiving a valid 
LCP echo-reply.  In the example above, pppd dies if it sends
three echoes without getting a reply. 

2) To complete this you will need to pass the number of retry attempts
to pppoed using the -R option. For example:
pppoed -R 4 
This will try to re-establish the connection up to 4 times after it 
is broken i.e if pppd dies the coonection will be re-established
upto 4 times. 

The caveat is that you will be assigned (more than likely) a new IP
address on every connection establishment.

I have found that, in the last few days since i added this feature, that
the LCP echoes were actually more than enough to ensure the connection was up
(i have had mine up for three days, and very inactive).

jhs -- 991023
