> Richard Rauch had problems with pppoe / routing.

Still do.  (^&


> Hi,
>
> you may have to look at your ip-up script.

I do not use such a script.  It is not needed with ppp or mouse-pppoe,
though I vaguely recall hearing about it in the past.  Does ppp no longer
work properly, in 1.6, without an ip-up?


> If you have no default route when you start the ppp connection
> you should be able to

I set the default route per the pppoe(4) man-page.  With mouse-pppoe I
actually had to probe ppp0 for the IP number, after the connection, then
do a "route change default".  (I have a little "dsl-start" script that
does that automatically with mouse-pppoe.  (^&)

With plain PPP, I would set the route by passing in the "defaultroute"
option to PPP.  This is a basic PPP option.  Unfortunately, mouse-pppoe
somehow prevents that feature from working, as perhaps does in-kernel
pppoe.

Anyway, the defaultroute is set.  If it weren't, I wouldn't be able to ssh
out like this.  (^&


> route add default IP_OF_OTHER_SIDE
> after pppoe0 is up.
>
> traceroute -n 128.42.5.14

It works *now*, too.  And it worked last night.  Although what a random IP
number has to do with the problem eludes me.

I think that perhaps I wasn't clear: mouse-pppoe seems broken under 1.6
(maybe I need to update the package?).  I can't get out on the 'net at all
with that, so I gave up on it and tried in-kernel pppoe.

The in-kernel pppoe works.  After enough futzing, it now is more or less
where mouse-pppoe was 2 days ago (under 1.5).  The only thing is a *MINOR*
annoyance:

  When I connect to my DSL ISP (Southwestern Bell), I get the usual
  dynamic IP assignment.  I can ``ifconfig pppoe0'' to find that.
  Say that number is ``ip'' for short.  Then I can type this command:

    ping ip

  ...and I can indeed ping myself.  But the route is going THROUGH
  my ISP (and back again I presume) for a roundtrip time of 30ms.


This isn't a big deal.  I don't really need to access my own system by the
pppoe IP number.  *Everything* else seems to work.  However, it's silly
that it does this.  mouse-pppoe didn't do this.  I *do* recall that plain
old dialup ppp0 did this for me, in the dim past, and I found a way to
stop it (adding a route to myself? but I tried manually doing that and was
refused).  I can't remember what I did in the past, but I assume that it's
caused by some similar abuse of the system on my part, and I'd like to fix
it if I can do so easily.

Understand that I'm not a complete idiot (some parts are missing), but I
am ignorant of large tracts of network configuration and administration.


Also, this is a thoroughly non-critical problem; everything works.
Everything that I *really* use (i.e., anything but sending packets to
myself via my PPPoE IP number) seems to work as I would expect.  The only
"surprise" is a silly inefficiency in a certain way of having my gateway
machine talk to itself.


> otherwise, have a look at route show

Alas: I've been there, done that.  I didn't see anything terribly
suspicious.  But, then, as I said (I think): Network administration is not
something I've ever done much with.  (^&

I've tried, in frustration, flushing the routing tables, since adding a
route to myself was blocked (I interpreted the error to indicate that it
thought that the route was already defined).  This seems harmless,
provided that the DSL route is (re)added.  (This may show the extent of my
ignorance: Why do we have so many routes filled in by default?  It seems
that the table has lots of routes that it doesn't need.  Abstractly, I'm
sure that there are situations where each is needed, but I have no idea
why we need to have all those routes that get stuck in by default.  (^&)



> HTH

Well, it helps to know that someone's responding.  Unfortunately, it
doesn't seem to have brought me any closer to a solution.


Thanks for your time, and for reading this far.  (^&


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu