I'm having trouble getting demand dial to work on debian testing. I
compiled my own kernel (2.4.21) and set up NAT. I uncommented the demand
and and idle 300 in /etc/ppp/options. I've tried it with and without the
persist option. Here's a little more info:

/etc/init.d/ppp start
Starting up PPP link: pppd.

ps aux
...
root 5271 0.0 0.3 1936 892 ? S 12:16 0:00 pppd call provider
...

route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
10.112.112.112 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
0.0.0.0 10.112.112.112 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ppp0

I use the /etc/init.d/ipmasq to enable NAT and it works fine. I don't
think the NAT has anything to do with it since I can try pinging outside
hosts while logged in locally to the server and it still doesn't
connect. Everything works fine if I comment out the demand option

Is there some option that I missed when configuring the kernel? or some option I missed in /etc/ppp/options?

Google is damn quick, searching for the fix, I came across my own post here.

Well it seems to be indeed a problem with the ipmasq. Someone somewhere suggested not starting ipmasq on startup and instead putting it in the ipup.d directory. But since I think that that may stop the clients from initiating the ppp link I didn't do that. Instead, I just typed "apt-get install diald". It initiated the link, and seems to work, but I'll have to do more testing.

I hope anyone with the same problem I had manages to google onto this page before wasting the time I did trying to make pppd work.