> When I bring up a system built from July 17 sup sources, pppd does
> not appear to finish the job of bringing up the ppp interface.

Blaz Zupan wins the gold star for figuring out my bonehead mistake:

> Yes, the ppp sources have been upgraded recently and the new
> kernel driver need an updated pppd.

I actually *had* compiled pppd, but because I was installing things
piecemeal (i.e. "cd /usr/src/bin ; make ; make install") I managed to
neglect to install the new /usr/sbin binaries, including pppd.  Drat.