Sorry, Pedro and I have been emailing offline and the thread here has gotten a little garbled.
It looks like his ISP's ppp server doesn't like the way Plan 9's ppp client talks to it. In particular the server won't respond to an empty configuration request (meaning that the client has gotten all the info it needs). So we changed ppp to always include the negotiated IP address so that the config request is never empty. That seems to have gotten past the ppp problems. I suggested inserting the loopback ipconfig into /rc/bin/termrc before dns starts so that it would not be necessary to start dns after pppoe. (It's really a bit of a bug that dns refuses to run without an IP address in the first place). If dns is already running, then it is not necessary to echo refresh into any files after starting pppoe: ppp (which pppoe runs) knows to do that for itself. Russ
