Re: looking for help from ppp users

On 03/12/2012, at 9:49, Eitan Adler <lists_at_eitanadler.com> wrote:
> I'm working on a project to review the FAQ: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ThwackAFAQ
> 
> I need volunteers to question through the questions starting "userppp"
> through "desperation" and review them.  If you don't have time to go
> through them all, just pick one and make this a group process.
> 
> Is it factually correct?
> Does it use deprecated functionality?
> Is it completely outdated to the point we should remove it?
> Does it need better examples?
> Is it clear and concise?
> Typos and spelling mistakes
> 
> It isn't that hard and would be a great help!

14.6 should probably read..
If you have Link Quality Reporting (LQR) configured, it is possible that too many LQR packets are lost between your machine and the peer. The ppp(8) program deduces that the line must therefore be bad, and disconnects. Prior to FreeBSD version 2.2.5, LQR was enabled by default. It is now disabled by default. LQR can be enabled with the following line:

enable lqr

[ie demonstrate how to enable it since it's off by default]

Is Brian Somers still a FreeBSD committer? Section 14.9 has his email address and suggests you contact him under some circumstances.

I would delete 14.11 because openmode is now the default and 14.12 mentions how and why you should disable it.

Section 14.20 says that PPP doesn't dump core because it is run as root, this is incorrect - it doesn't dump core because it is set UID.

Section 14.22 could basically be replaced with "use 'nat same_ports yes'", or suggest the user use PF for NAT and run the miniupnpd port. Certainly these days games (and every other network app) are much more NAT savvy due to its prevalence.

I would also add a section about MTU - I expect the dominant use case for PPP is ADSL these days. In this case the MTU is usually limited to 1492 bytes (1500 byte ethernet frame minus PPP framing overhead). If all ICMP is blocked at some part of the link then packet fragmentation doesn't work properly and you end up with symptoms like interactive SSH logins work but bulk SCP or FTPs don't.

I hope that helps!

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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