Apologies to non UK readers, the pun above wont make much sense…

The issue with PPPD is persisting. However I think I have it cracked.

I need to get PPPD up, running and connected, during this I need to know what it’s up to, I also need to know when it stops so I can force it back up.

First PPPD has the ‘persist’ option to do this, however I need to have control over it as I will be doing other QOS monitoring above the LCP monitoring done by PPPD so I’ll probobly kill it off before it thinks its had a problem.

Next up, there is some support for doing this, I can tell that PPPD is up and running by looking in /var/run but this just says its running. Worse still this doesnt help before PPPD starts nor does it tell me that the link is there. Off we go to two provided scripts in /etc/PPPD.

IP-UP runs once the link is up and running, IP-DOWN surprisingly, runs when the link goes down. So the first attempt we drop a file in /tmp to say that we are up and remove it when we are down. So we now know that PPPD is up and when its connected and when it goes away. Sadly this still leaves us a problem. When the scripts to bring the modem up run, they are forked elswhere and PPPD doesnt generate a PID till the CHAT script hands over. This means going by the fles and PID our program thinks the link is still down and will be trying to bring it back. Pesky, harmless but fills the logs with rubbish.

We are using the PON/POFF scripts so for now we will edit /usr/bin/pon. We will leave POFF alone as the interface going down will clear out the files. In /usr/bin/pon we now drop a file called pppstarting.sem to indicate that we got to the end of the startup script OK and we are now going to attempt to dial.

This all works provided the modem is present. if not it all breaks as as yet I cant find out how to deal with this and take out the pppstarting.

Both PFSense and SmoothWall seem to do the same sort of thing so I may go and pick apart their PPP scripts for ideas.

There may also be a need to loop back the power LED to the PI as helpfully, the power button needs to be toggled, there is no way to know if its on or off witout talking to the modem.