...

pppd also sometimes totally exits, so if you put it in the boot up scripts only it will not restart if it dies, unless you reboot or manually restart it.

hmm maybe I should write a script, called from /etc/rc.d/init.d/network, that loops round starting pppd in case it exits??

Yes, that would work, however, why have a script, running as root, constantly looping? With a crontab you can get it to check every hour whether pppd has died: 0 * * * * /root/check-ppp 1>/dev/null or every 10mins (I think the syntax is right..): */10 * * * * /root/check-ppp 1>/dev/null

check-ppp: #!/bin/sh /sbin/ifconfig | /usr/bin/grep ppp0 >/dev/null 2>&1 if [ "$?" = "1" ]; then /usr/sbin/ppp-go # or whatever you are using to start pppd fi

or something like that..

I noticed that even with idle time set the link wasn't going down... I ran tcpdump to see what it is, and it seems ICQ says 'hello' to the server every minute, and Netscape grabs mail every 10. So, add a filter to pppd, so it doesn't count those connections in its idle timer... using tcpdump I made a filterstring to use with pppd option 'active-filter' -, but according to the pppd man: 'This option is cur­ rently only available under NetBSD' :-/

Anything else I can try?

Not afaik. Could the intervals that icq and netscape generate traffic be altered, or not run in the background?

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