[UFO Chicago] ppp0 hanging

[Nate Riffe]

Quoting Peter A. Peterson II:
> Quoting Nate Riffe:
> > The premise behind PPPoE is that when your computer is off, it is no
> > longer using its IP address, even if the DSL is technically still
> > active.  So ISPs devised this scheme (an evil scheme I think) so
> > that when you turn your computer on, it "connects" and when you turn
> > it off it "disconnects" from the ISP.  That way, when your computer
> > is not on, its IP address can return to the pool of available
> > addresses and be reassigned to another user.  I think it's evil for
> > two reasons: First of all, it is yet another potential point of
> > failure in broadband services that implement it (a problem which you
> > are experiencing in the form of timeouts), and secondly it is a
> > violation in principle of the "Always
> > On" quality that broadband providers are selling to people.
> 
> One way around this debacle is to leave your computer always on, and
> run something like "ping movealong.org -i 10" which will ping Nate's
> box every ten seconds. No more timing out!
> 

I would recommend pinging betazed.movealong.org or humble.movealong.org,
actually.  I have tendency to ipchains -j DENY addresses that hit
meatball.movealong.org with NIMDA/excessive pinging/CodeRed/random TCP
connections, and yes, I do keep on eye on that.  Although, I am MUCH
more lenient on the pinging than the other things.

-Nate

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