Hello,
I am using SuSE 7.3 PPC for a short while now and have experienced problems with smppd/pppd. I am not quite sure where the problem lies, the older wvdial/pppd combo worked fine on SuSE 7.1 PPC.
While booting the /etc/rc3.d/smppd is started. The start_on_start directive is set to always. Just after the machine has booted I login as root and do a ifconfig to find that the ppp0 interface does not exist. After entering "rcsmpppd restart" everything is fine.
A closer look to the output of smpppd/pppd revealed that pppd did not go beyond outputting "passwordfd.so loaded" while booting, but did output "Using interface ppp0" and more when restarting smpppd.
Meanwhile if have found the reason for this strange behavior: it is a bug in the passwordfd plugin of pppd-2.4.1. There is a terminating { NULL } option missing at the end of the option list. See any other option list for reference. Uwe