From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202 Description of problem: In spite of ppp-watch changelog entries regarding 30 second timeout waiting for ppp interface to start, ppp-watch does not timeout, does not detach, until packets are received which trigger dial-on-demand. This causes the boot sequence to freeze for an arbitrarily long time (traffic dependent). How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Configure DEMAND=yes and ONBOOT=yes in ifcfg-ppp0 2.Reboot Actual Results: System freezes at starting interface ppp0 until a packet is seen that triggers dial-on-demand to dial. On a standalone system that could be forever. On a gateway another host can be used to trigger a dial. Expected Results: Interface ppp0 start should complete almost immediately. DEMAND mode merely implies it is monitoring for demand, not dialling immediately, so we should not wait for it. Additional info: This problem exists in RH 7.x also.
Created attachment 88735 [details] A tidy avoidance of this bug. This patch to ifup-ppp handles the DEMAND option intelligently to induce correct behaviour. The ideal solution might be fixing ppp-watch to be DEMAND aware instead.
I believe this is fixed differently in 7.03-1.