[Techtalk] pon dsl-provider deprecated at boot up time

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi, all,

Let's backtrack here.

My main aim was to automate the connection a la windows (adsl is just
there, no clicks, no commands)

The original pppoeconf used to ask the question 'do you want this to
start at boot-time' to which I answered 'yes'.

plog always showed a connection, but there wasn't one, ie couldn't
browse

If I remember clearly then pon dsl-provider didn't help, the only way to
get it going was to run pppoeconf everytime which got it going.
Thereafter in that session pon or poff did as they were told.

Because of the failure of pppoeconf to establish an automatic connection
I decided to upgrade pppoeconf. No benefit was determined thereby.

Then I had the bright idea of updating pppoe itself. No benefit was
determined thereby either

Now I am uptodate with the exception of a dated readme.

Enter Wim. His suggestion doesn't achieve anything either. In fact
things start to go rapidly downhill with

a  no adsl connection whatever
b  my email behaves oddly, with 'Helo... you are not me' messages when
trying to send to the telecoms smtp server.

what did I do? run pppoeconf for sure.

At this stage a plog did not show the usual output of assigned ip
addresses and the like. I noted two things from the plog (didn't record
them accurately however)

c  addresses were 'out of the usable range' (or something like that)
d  a plugin rp-pppoe.so was reported installed


What I did to bring back sanity was to 

e  restore the mangled etc/network/interfaces to its original glory 
f  comment out the line in dsl-provider responsible for the plugin 

now that got me back where I was before we started. viz.

g  on boot up plog shows an adsl connection
h  which is not actually operative

i  I uncomment Wim's lines back into interfaces, reboot, and
hey-presto I have an instant connection!!!!!!!!!!! 

I still have a wonky email, but I'll get there.

Now, about that k teatime thing....

Thanks Wim

Anne