Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 851
usernet get confused as to ppp connection state
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:48 EDT
Using usernet to allow user to bring up and take down a ppp connection. Works most of the time. But occasionally gets very confused as to whether the link is up or not. I can duplicate problem by clicking on the ppp0 button while status is yellow, or by double clicking it in rapid succession. It appears to not realize that the link is in the process of comming up and launches a second pppd demon to bring the link up again, which gets stuck because the first pppd demon has the modem device locked. Thereafter every attempt to use usernet to change the ppp0 link status launches yet another pppd demon. Only way out of mess is to logon as root user and kill all of the pppd and if-up processes.
This has been observed to be true on a machine in the test lab. The problem actually lies with more than usernet itself, more to do with the way initscripts handles ppp connections. It will possibly be fixed at a later date.
*** Bug 1156 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Clicking on the ppp0 widget at the wrong time (when PPP is coming up or going down, or the ISP isn't responding), or clicking on the color widget, can put usernet into a lost state where it no longer brings PPP up or brings it down, or re-initializes the modem. Colors may change, but modem activity does not. Killing and restarting usernet doesn't clear this. Tried killing X Windows and logging out, then coming back in. That didn't help. Re-booting the host cleared the problem.
Michael, what is the status of this? Can we resolve this?
Fixing this requires a new version of ppp and changes to initscripts that depend on the new version of ppp. The new version of ppp and initscripts are in the RawHide tree. They seem to be pretty reliable in limited testing; it sometimes takes a while to take the interface down because chat/wvdial take a while to stop when signaled, but the new code seems otherwise reliable. Unfortunately, we can't really fix it adequately in older releases. :-( So this should be fixed now in RawHide, and the next official release of Red Hat Linux should have it fixed as well.