Art Alexion on 15 Sep 2004 12:10:03 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] rp-pppoe and Verizon DSL 

William H. Magill wrote:

On 13 Sep, 2004, at 21:18, Art Alexion wrote:

Rebecca Ore wrote:

Verizon tends to have spates of down times and then long runs of no problems at all from the Germantown CO. I suspect different COs have different ups and downs.


I am in the Abington CO.


The scenario with Verizon seems to be ... DSL runs fine for months, until they need to add/repair/upgrade equipment. Then stability goes to hell-in-a-hand-basket for a couple of days, weeks or months.

Eventually, they quit "fixing things," and everything runs stable again.

I'm in Evergreen and have seen this pattern repeated now for something like about 6 years (since they introduced DSL into Evergreen). I run without problems for six months or more and then, wham! It happens again.

All of this has nothing to do with PPPoE. I use DCAnet with static IPs (as well as assigned DHCP addresses) and pure IP. The problem is clearly with Verizon's DSLAMs or the ATM cloud. If you can watch the modem, the link light goes out and comes back ... probably DSLAM resets. Other times there are issues with "CO switch reloads" where the configuration for the ATM cloud behind the DSLAMs keeps getting modified.


Whoa! Way over my head. I found the following excerpts in the pppoe documentation:

From the pppoe man page:

      -T timeout
             The  -T  option  causes pppoe to exit if no session
             traffic is detected for timeout seconds.  I  recom-
             mend  that  you  use this option as an extra safety
             measure, but if you do, you should make  sure  that
             PPP  generates  enough  traffic so the timeout will
             normally not be triggered.  The best way to do this
             is  to  use  the  lcp-echo-interval option to pppd.
             You should set the PPPoE timeout to be  about  four
             times the LCP echo interval.

And from the pppd man page:

      lcp-echo-interval n
             If this option is given,  pppd  will  send  an  LCP
             echo-request  frame  to  the  peer every n seconds.
             Normally the  peer  should  respond  to  the  echo-
             request  by sending an echo-reply.  This option can
             be used with the lcp-echo-failure option to  detect
             that the peer is no longer connected.

...

OPTIONS FILES
      Options can be taken from files as  well  as  the  command
      line.  Pppd reads options from the files /etc/ppp/options,
      ~/.ppprc  and  /etc/ppp/options.ttyname  (in  that  order)
      before  processing  the  options on the command line.  (In
      fact, the command-line options are  scanned  to  find  the
      terminal  name  before  the options.ttyname file is read.)
      In forming the name of the options.ttyname file, the  ini-
      tial  /dev/  is  removed  from  the terminal name, and any
      remaining / characters are replaced with dots.


Is it possible that tinkering with the pppoe timeout value and the lcp-echo-interval of pppd would solve my problem.

I think it is a configuration problem because of the nature of the windows implementation of pppoe is not set to automatically reconnect. Hence, if I was getting the same disconnects when the Windows machine was connected, I would be repeatedly prompted to manually reconnect -- and I am not.

--

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