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#! rnews 2675 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!scanner.worldgate.com!news.agtac.net!news.planet.eon.net!news From: "Bill Fahey" <bill@tic.ab.ca> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: ppp timeout problem with direct cable connection Date: 28 Aug 1996 22:19:10 GMT Organization: Smith & Jones Lines: 47 Message-ID: <01bb9537$644e17c0$47dca1c6@brmt1e.tic.ab.ca> References: <4vs21k$1rk@tuegate.tue.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: brmt1d.tic.ab.ca Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155 Peter Benschop <rcbapb@urc.tue.nl> wrote in article <4vs21k$1rk@tuegate.tue.nl>... > Hi! > > I am in the process of setting up a FreeBSD server that is connected to my > ISP via a permanent serial line. The server should be configured to set up > the ppp connection without user interference after a reboot. Therefore I use > ppp -auto. Also, I do a single ping to the outside world at startup, to wake > the thing up. > > All seems well at first, but every 838839778...840935198 secs I get a > timeout and the connection drops dead. (The timeout number keeps increasing, > strangely enough...) I set up a similar system with the same sort of problem, although the disconnects I experience seem to happen at fairly random intervals. At first, it was disconnecting more or less every few hours. I upgraded the generic modem to a USR Sportster. After the new modem, the connection still drops fairly randomly although most of the time the link stays up for 2-3 days. I read an article somewhere (can't for the life of me remember where it was) that said to turn off the modem error correction as this tends to cause TCP/IP links to die when there are errors. I did this on my system couple of days ago but it does not seem to have fixed the problem. Now, though, I have many HDLC FCS errors. AFAIK, the FCS is like a checksum and so this leads me to believe that the phone line I am using may be noisy. If anyone has better info on this, please post it. Also, the article said to increase the time the modem waits to drop the line when it loses the carrier. I have not done this yet but will be trying it out in the next day or two. For a work-around on this problem, I set up a cron job that pings the ISP gateway every minute so that the connection is down for less than a minute each time (barring any other problems). Bill Fahey bill@tic.ab.ca