Refresh my memory... What version of SuSE are you running? I wonder if there is something flakey in SuSEs smpppd support. I had similar problems.
I'm writing from Alaska but our company has a SuSE 8.1 server in Hobart Taz, on bigpond, and it used to disconnect all the time if we let it sit too long. We tried the dial on demand bit, and went round and round with that.
We scheduled 3 ping every 3 minutes with crontab. We scheduled a cinternet redial every 15 minutes. It seems to do nothing if the link is already up, but did trigger dials if we indentionally shut doen the link and let cron trigger the following command: cinternet --start
Our /etc/sysconfig/network/providers/dsl-provider0 file looks like this... ----- PROVIDER="DSL provider" DSLSUPPORTED="yes" MODEMSUPPORTED="no" ISDNSUPPORTED="no" USERNAME="XXXXXXXX@bigpond" PASSWORD="YYYYYYYY" IDLETIME="920" DEMAND="yes" DNS1="61.9.128.14" DNS2="61.9.128.15" ----- (yes we did have to hardwire thos DNS servers) And note we manually modified this file to get 920 in there because the yast page did not seem to like that value.
With this combination of stuff it stays on line. I can't be sure just which of these is keeping the link alive, but its been up for over two months with no lan-side sourced traffic now (all inbound from the net).
Hope this helps...
____________________________________ John Andersen
The system runs SuSE 8.2 Professional. The provider file is pretty much the same as yours, except that the idle time is set to '0' for unlimited timeout. My experiance with the ADSL in Australia has been that it is pretty crappy for reliablity, with some weeks we get downtime every day sometimes upto a quite a few hours. I might disable the dial on demand & write a shell script that checks for connectivity & if down runs cinternet if it is down, then run it with a cron job. Jasmine -- Jasmine Davis - Photo Girl www.photo-girl.com Registered Linux User Since August 1999, No: 218292 -------------------------->> Welcome to SuSE Linux 8.2 i686 - Kernel 2.4.20-64GB-SMP hotgirls login: 9:51am up 1 day 17:54, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.16, 0.14