PPPOE-CONNECT

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 21 February 2000
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NAME

pppoe-connect - Shell script to manage a PPPoE link

SYNOPSIS

pppoe-connect [config_file]

pppoe-connect interface user [config_file]

DESCRIPTION

pppoe-connect is a shell script which manages a PPPoE connection using the Roaring Penguin user-space PPPoE client. If you omit config_file, the default file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0 is used. If you supply interface and user, then they override the Ethernet interface and user-name settings in the configuration file.

Note that normally, you should not invoke pppoe-connect directly. Instead, use pppoe-start to bring up the PPPoE connection.

pppoe-connect first reads a configuration file. It then brings up a PPPoE connection. If the connection ever drops, a message is logged to syslog, and pppoe-connect re-establishes the connection. In addition, each time the connection is dropped or cannot be established, pppoe-connect executes the script /etc/ppp/pppoe-lost if it exists and is executable.

The shell script pppoe-stop causes pppoe-connect to break out of its loop, bring the connection down, and exit.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

pppoe-connect uses the following shell variables from the configuration file:

ETH: The Ethernet interface connected to the DSL modem (for example, eth0).
USER: The PPPoE user-id (for example, b1xxnxnx@sympatico.ca).
PIDFILE: A file in which to write the process-ID of the pppoe-connect process (for example, /var/run/pppoe.pid). Two additional files ($PIDFILE.pppd and $PIDFILE.pppoe) hold the process-ID's of the pppd and pppoe processes, respectively.

By using different configuration files with different PIDFILE settings, you can manage multiple PPPoE connections. Just specify the configuration file as an argument to pppoe-start and pppoe-stop.

AUTHOR

pppoe-connect was written by Dianne Skoll <dianne@skoll.ca>.

The pppoe home page is https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/rp-pppoe/.