I would like to allow users to open the PPP link themselves as needed, rather than doing it at boot time via /etc/init.d/ppp (or making them su to root and running pppd). I would be grateful if anyone has an opinion about the nicest way to do this under Debian. (Given that the binary is under /usr/sbin, I guess users are not expected to use it, so I am resigned to transgressing against Debian to some extent.) As I understand it, I can do this by chmod-ing the pppd binary to be suid, with root as the owner. For further security, I can create a group ppp, chown pppd to root.ppp, give only the group execute access to pppd, and add the relevant users to the group ppp. Finally, as the binary is in /usr/sbin, there is an aesthetic question about whether the users should include this in their path, or if I should make a link from /usr/local/bin/pppd (or something) to /usr/sbin/pppd. (I know diald exists, but I wanted to get a simple solution working first.)
The following question might not be Debian-related, apologies in that case... I am using the latest version of ppp (2.2) and the 1.2.13 kernel that includes support for it. I use pppd (and chat) to connect to a provider via my modem and the telephone line. This seems to work fine in that it sets up the IP connection correctly; I can ping, telnet, rlogin, ftp, ... - made me very happy. My problem is that after a few minutes of "inactivity" on the IP link, pppd dies. (I don't understand IP well enough to claim the link is really inactive. What I mean is that I am not running ping, rlogin, ftp, ... Also, on one occasion I had an rlogin going but I wasn't doing anything on it.) /var/log/daemon.log shows a report from pppd that it is terminating because of SIGHUP. I personally didn't send pppd a SIGHUP. (As far as I know!) I would like to know why pppd is dying like this. Is something sending it a SIGHUP signal? Is it killing itself? Is it set up by default to kill itself after a few minutes of inactivity? This would be reasonable enough, but in that case, how can I change this behaviour? Basically I want to have control over when the link dies. (I found the persist flag in the man page, but as I understand it this will make it re-connect, whereas I would prefer it not to terminate the link in the first place.) Thanks in advance for help Philip Tuckey
