It appears that ppp no longer honors the maxfail option to limit the number of times to redial the modem if the line does not connect. This may be in ppp-watch -- I've just started looking at it's code. The problem my customer is having is that they are trying to dial a number of machines located around the state (NOT ISP's) and sometimes one of them is down. ppp just keeps dialing that one, generating hundreds of phone calls. A second problem is that the line sometimes fails to disconnect, even if ifdown is called. I will attempt to fix that with a "maxconnect" option.
Created attachment 208 [details] Fix ppp-watch to honor a MAXFAIL variable controlling dialing
I have generated a patch, which will look in ifcfg-pppx for a MAXFAIL setting that will stop the redialing after a certain number of tries. It's in the attachement. I found that setting the idle and/or maxconnect options will force the line to drop after x idle seconds, or y seconds connected.
The ppp-watch program is part of the initscripts package, so I'm changing the component to initscripts.
Will be added in initscripts-5.53-1.
This patch introduces a serious bug into ppp-watch, please see bug #39231 for a fix.