Improving reliability of PPPoE Client

Hi,

I have nearly finished moving from pfSense to VyOS. While I have been finishing the firewall configuration, I have been swapping the connections between my old hardware (pfsense) and new hardware (VyOS) but found that when connecting the ethernet cable to VyOS box, the PPPoE connection was not coming up automatically.

I took at look at the connect-on-demand option for a PPPoE interface, which seems to map to the demand configuration option for pppd, but it appears to do the opposite of what I want:

demand Initiate the link only on demand, i.e. when data traffic is
present. With this option, the remote IP address may be speci‐
fied by the user on the command line or in an options file, or
if not, pppd will use an arbitrary address in the 10.x.x.x
range. Pppd will initially configure the interface and enable
it for IP traffic without connecting to the peer. When traffic
is available, pppd will connect to the peer and perform negotia‐
tion, authentication, etc.

Which looks to me if it was intended for the good old days of dial-up modems and not DSL?

As far as I can tell PPPoE interfaces are brought up automatically when VyOS boots up. But seems to give up after a while, if PPPoE is unable to connect.

I have had a couple of ideas:

  1. Would it make sense to change VyOS to add maxfail 0 to the pppd configuration? At the moment, it looks like pppd defaults to giving up after 10 attempts. Would it need to be configurable?
  2. Start pppd automatically X seconds after the Ethernet interfaces comes up - perhaps a /etc/network/if-up.d script? And bring it down again, if Ethernet goes down.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues?
Is these a solution that I am missing?

Thanks,

nick.

1 Like

I‘m on your side on this. The default of maxfail10 makes little sense. Will change it to 0.

https://phabricator.vyos.net/T2087

2 Likes

Thanks! Very happy to submit a PR. Just can be hard to know as an outsider, which is a good idea and what is off-strategy.

If pppd never gives up - then I guess it will try connecting again, not too long after the interfaces comes up again.

Follow up: I installed 1.3-rolling-202003190217 today and verified that it contains the following line now:

# Unlimited connection attempts
maxfail 0

Thanks for making this change so quickly @c-po

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