[Jerry Feldman]
There are many reasons a dialup can become disconnected. Sometimes excessive line noise, sometimes the ISP will drop connections.
Also, make sure you disable call waiting. If you have call waiting and have not disabled it, an incoming call can cause a disconnect.
Yes! I lost some time on this one, a few years ago! :-)
Because of the varying length of times, that your problem may be related to your phone network.
Could it be that you have an ISP which is aggressive against idle time? This happened to me in the past. A simple solution is to send a packet once in a while, just to prove that there is something living at your end. For sending a packet every two minutes, in a shell: ping -i 120 SOME-REMOTE-IP & However, for being a good citizen, you should make sure you do not forget this process running if you are really getting away from your computer. Another solution, which I probably like better, is to trigger PPP connections on demand. If I remember well, YaST nicely helped me into setting this up, on this SuSE 8.2 system. The idea is that the connection is re-established whenever it gets needed again, if it happened to be dropped in the meantime. You have to suffer a few seconds once in a while for establishing a connection, but you might feel able to bear it. :-) -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard