I have a fairly crowded network, and in it there is a Sun 3/60 running
NetBSD.  It is my router; it is connected to a modem, and the modem connects
to the outside world.

I have noticed the following symptoms:

	while true
	do
		sleep 600
		if      ping -c 10 192.129.84.4 | grep icmp_seq >/dev/null 2>&1
		then    :
		else    eval `ps -x | awk '$5 ~ /pppd/ {print "kill -HUP " $1}'`
			sleep 5
			pppd
		fi
	done

1.  The above script fairly frequently chooses to kill pppd when the link
is working perfectly well.

2.  If I'm doing a fairly large download to either a mac or a windoze PC,
which is connected to the 3/60 over ethernet, the network feed (which I'm
watching as modem LED's) will abruptly stop transferring data, and hang for
several minutes.  However, if I hit return in an rlogin to a machine on the
other end of the link, everything recovers for a while, running anywhere from
three seconds to a minute, and then hangs again.

The PPP link is over a 28.8 modem which claims to have some compression.  I
don't recall seeing this when I was using my Amiga as a network feed.

Any suggestions?  Is this a sun thing, or a PPP thing, or a couple-months-old
-current thing?

-s