For a long time, my pppoe connection came up automatically when my computer started up, as part of the network startup script in RedHat 9.0.

Recently, the network script stopped being able to bring up the ppp connection automatically. I started logging messages to syslog, and I see this:

Aug 3 21:03:12 watchtower network: Bringing up interface ppp0: failed
Aug 3 21:03:17 watchtower pppd[415]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Aug 3 21:03:17 watchtower pppd[415]: Connection terminated.
Aug 3 21:03:21 watchtower pppoe[416]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Aug 3 21:03:21 watchtower pppd[415]: Exit.

I have googled on the error messages contained in this excerpt and found many, many varying responses, none of which have been of much help. Further complicating things is the fact that if I log in and bring up the connection manually ('ifup ppp0' from the command line), everything works fine. How could the script fail during startup, but work when I start it manually?

If there are logs/configuration files that would be helpful, please let me know.

Thanks.

*perhaps* the required modules do not get loaded when adsl-start is attempted at startup.