Hello all,

I'm somewhat new to the networking end of things and I've been struggling lately trying to get pppd to run. I've read everything I could find in the posts (I think) but haven't really found the answer to my problem.

I have a linux router machine connected to my DSL modem. My ISP provides an IP via DHCP. The other machines on the LAN have static addresses assigned to them.

My problem is that I haven't been successful in getting pppd to run on the linux router machine and I'm not sure what's missing. Here's some (perhaps) relevant information:

*) The eth1 interface is being used to connect the linux router with the rest of the LAN. It's successfully brought up and initialized with a static IP.

*) There is no ifcfg-eth0 setup (I was told I didn't need it for what I was trying to do) so it doesn't appear in ifconfig output unless I explicitly bring it up manually first.

*) The chap and pap secrets files seem to be fine with the proper information.

*) Here are the contents of the /etc/ppp/options file:
lock
noauth
noipdefault
usepeerdns

*) The problem isn't physical; the cable is good and I'm able to access the internet from my other machine if I plug the DSL modem into a Linksys router. Plus, the linux router is able to ping other machines on the LAN, it just doesn't communicate with the DSL side of things.

*) I'm running Mandrake 9.0 (2.4.19-16mdk), ppp-2.4.1-mdk, with rp-pppoe-3.5-1mdk.

At this point I'm just trying to get the linux router to talk with the DSL modem. After booting up, I've tried running /usr/sbin/pppd, which just seems to time out. The messages log looks like this:

Jan 6 23:29:33 maurizio pppd[1401]: pppd 2.4.1 started by root, uid 0
Jan 6 23:29:33 maurizio pppd[1401]: Using interface ppp0
Jan 6 23:29:33 maurizio pppd[1401]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/vc/1
Jan 6 23:30:03 maurizio pppd[1401]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Jan 6 23:30:03 maurizio pppd[1401]: Connection terminated.
Jan 6 23:30:03 maurizio pppd[1401]: Exit.

What's missing? As I understand it, if pppd starts up then it should create and bring up the ppp0 interface (which would use eth0). The strange thing is all of this used to work before I replaced a simple NIC!!

How can you not configure eth0? That's the NIC communicating with the modem, no? Plus, wasn't pppd bound to the eth0 NIC before you replaced it? Eth1 is set for your internal LAN, so of course you're able to ping those machines. But eth1 is also the gateway machine so that your internal machines can communicate with eth0, which is supposed to know about the modem. Plus, if eth0 is a new NIC, you'll have to tell the kernel to initialize it on startup.

What's the output of 'ifconfig -a?'

Regards,
Geoff.

Thanks for the reply wheelsg, but I'm afraid I can't give you any more information. After getting no replies, and my need to connect asap, I did something I'd been considering for quite a while -- switch to Debian (I'm glad I did, apt-get is very cool). My new distro had no problem getting everything synched up.

Anyway, in my previous setup eth0 was indeed configured to talk with the modem, but with the new NIC pppd just refused to come up. I tried all sorts of things and just got nowhere with it. So unfortunately it'll have to remain an unsolved mystery...

Thanks anyway!