On Sun, 1 Dec 1996, synapse wrote:

> okay, ppp works great now. no problems at all.
> to disconnect, people to tell me to kill ppp, so i look it up in the
> process table and kill it. "kill -9 <pid-of-pppd>". i manually reset the
> modem by shutting it off and turning it back on.
> now, i get THIS while attempting to restart pppd:
> ---cut here---
> Dec  1 20:39:49 friction pppd[105]: pppd 2.3.0 started by root, uid 0
> Dec  1 20:40:26 friction pppd[105]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/tty00
> Dec  1 20:40:27 friction pppd[105]: Couldn't set interface address: Address
> alre
> ady exists
> Dec  1 20:40:27 friction pppd[105]: Couldn't add default route: File exists
> Dec  1 20:40:27 friction pppd[105]: Couldn't add default route: File exists
> Dec  1 20:40:27 friction pppd[105]: local  IP address 199.232.253.20
> Dec  1 20:40:27 friction pppd[105]: remote IP address 128.103.21.15
> ---cut here---
> what are the errors for? whatever they are, i assume they cause pppd not to
> work. if i attempt to run a copy of ftp, ircii, or any other program that
> would use the modem, the modem send light blinks, but the receive light
> does not respond at all. to alleviate this problem, i have to reboot the
> machine, and from then on, the problem goes away. (that is, until i kill
> pppd and attempt to run it again). notice that the internet provider
> dynamically assigns me an address. i have listed some of the files
> associated with pppd in order to find a fix for this problem:

Hmmm.  kill -KILL is exactly what I do to bring ppp down, and it works 
just fine.  Are you doing the kill as root?  And do you really have to 
shut the modem off to bring it down?  When I kill pppd, it drops carrier 
on the modem all by itself.  (Stupid question time...)  Are you using a 
"hardware flow-control cable" on your modem?  If so, turn on the crtscts 
option in your /etc/ppp/options file - this will enable the machine to 
tell the modem to "hang up".

Anyway, those errors mean that the new incarnation of pppd is trying to 
insert the defaultroute but there's already one there - this basically 
means that the kill you did before didn't work.

Now the blinking lights, that's another story.  Once you've shut off the 
modem, it forgets any baud-rate detection that it's done before, and 
starts anew.  Almost anything can cause the modem to "settle" on a speed, 
and if it picks the wrong one, it'll never recognize the AT command when 
you try to bring up the connection again.  The crtscts will actually help 
this problem too.

Good luck!