From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.3 i686; en-US; rv:0.8.1+) Gecko/20010421 I have one box that acts as the gateway for my house network. We only have a dial up line. I have been using pppd with 2.3.x and 2.4.x kernels for some time with this setup. I upgraded to 7.1 a day or so ago. Now, the demand and persistent connections make pppd or ppp-watch spawn multiple pppd's. For example: Connection is terminated. I should only have one pppd running with an entry of ppp0 in ifconfig for it. Now, with RedHat 7.1 I get two pppd's and ppp0,ppp1 in ifconfig. This was an upgrade install and not a clean install. I believe though that all 7.1 things were installed that had previous parts. No dependency problems. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a pppd connection 2. Make it demand in options and make it persistant 3. Get it to connect 4. Drop connection 5. ps xa, ifconfig Actual Results: I get too many ppp interfaces and pppd's running. Expected Results: One pppd running. One interface.
I have found additional things. I still do not know if ppp-watch or pppd is at fault. The above directions do not cause the problem. It seems pppd is unkillable, however, ppp-watch seems to see the signal to die and spawns a new pppd. Hence the multiple pppd's. I had reasons for having if-down.local in /etc/ppp kill the pppd (I cannot remember this late at night what they were, it seems it had to do with some other program working right). It is a bug for pppd to ignore the QUIT (I believe that is the default for kill) signal. It is also a bug for pppd to see that signal and assume pppd is dead and restart it without verifying that pppd went away. Two bugs: pppd doesn't respond to the signal mentioned above, and ppp-watch restarts pppd when it shouldn't.
I suspect this is a duplicate of bug #39231. There's a patch there, please tell if it fixes your problem.
I had a similar issue with ppp-watch. It did not redial when the connection was broken, like it did in RH 6.2. Until a new release of initscripts is released, I simply copied the ppp-watch program from my system backup tape, and replaced the rh 7.1 version. Works like advertised, now.
Please verify this with a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core and reopen it against the new version if it still occurs. Closing as "not a bug" for now.