Also Sprach Jean-Francois Dive
>please check your logs and see what happens at disconnect time, this
>should lead your investigations..

Alas...its not that simple in this case.

If you've never had the misfortune of working with Cincinnati Bell's DSL
network, thank your lucky stars!  This is the most poorly designed
network that I have ever had the misfortune of working with (anyone that
deals with Cincy Bell, feel free to tell them that I said that...they're
well aware of my feelings on the subject).

We use L2TP to create an overlay network of connections of Cincinnati
Bell/Zoomtown's IP network (using RFC1918 addressing) that customer's
connect to via DSL.  To get access to IgLou's network via Zoomtown, the
customer has to go to a web page, the "dashboard", and "log in" to
Zoomtown and IgLou through the dashboard.  (Dirty little not-so-secret
tidbit...when you specify "IgLou" in the dashboard, any username and
password at all will work).  Once that is done, you have access to
connect to our LNS using L2TP

The problem is that Zoomtown will periodically time-out these dashboard
connections, so the user has to periodically return to the dashboard to
"re-authenticate" with the dashboard.  Of course, Cincinnati
Bell/Zoomtown *could* have used nice standards-based protocols to
accomplish this, but no...that would make too much sense...you have to
load a web page to authenticate *spit*.

So, users created tools like Zoombot and zippy.pl (former is a Windows
thing, zippy.pl is in Perl) to automate the task of re-authenticating
periodically.  If you aren't using one of these tools to maintain your
Zoomtown login, I would suggest them...pointers to them can be found at:
http://gotbroadband.org/downloads.html

Also...you'll probably need to tweak your routing table for this to all
work right.  Information on doing so is available at:
http://support.iglou.com/fom-serve/cache/280.html

I would say that your problem is *most likely* a result of Zoomtown
timing out your connection at the dashboard...which results in the
tunnel disconnecting since it can't get any traffic through (including
keepalives)...so the tunnel disconnects some time (potentially a fairly
significant amount of time) *after* the dashboard has timed you
out....and, there are no logs from the dashboard, so there are no logs
to indicate *why* this happened.

Anyway...there may be other problems here, but this is by far and away
the most common complaint we hear from customers on disconnects via
Zoomtown.

Yes, for those of you who don't deal with Cincy Bell/Zoomtown...its
every bit as bad as what it seems like from this message...probably
worse, and that doesn't even get into the interconnect to the ISPs and
how its blatently anti-competitive (10Mbps ethernet drop, which means
that we effectively can't co-locate our equipment with any telco's other
than Cincinnati Bell).

>On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 10:04:37PM -0400, Japhy Ryder wrote:
>>I've been having a lot of problems w/ my ISP 'iglou.com' disconnecting
>>my L2TP tunnel that connects my DSL line to my ISP. If this is
>>automatic because of lack of traffic or tunnel errors I just don't
>>know. More importantly though it very bothersome for me to come home
>>and find out my  server has been offline. I know that L2TPd has an
>>autoreconnect feature but I just can't seem to get it configured
>>right. Here's all the relevant info I can come up with.
 
>> 
>> root-# cat /etc/l2tp/l2tpd.conf
>> root-# cat /etc/l2tp/l2tp-secrets
>> # Secrets for authenticating l2tp tunnels
>> # us    them    secret
>> bw01 204.255.233.225 password
>> root-# cat /etc/ppp/options
>> user bw01
>> defaultroute
>> asyncmap 0
>> mru 1464
>> mtu 1464
>> noauth
>> root-# cat /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
>> bw01 *       password
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I'm not sure how much of this info any of you might need, but I'd rather
>> supply too much info than too little. I've edited the password fields
>> for obvious reasons.
>> 
>> I currently initiate an L2TP tunnel by using the following commands:
>> 
>> root-# /usr/local/sbin/l2tpd -D &
>> root-# echo t 204.255.233.225 > /var/run/l2tp-control
>> root-# echo c <tid> > /var/run/l2tp-control
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> This always works fine for initiating a connection, but when my ppp
>> tunnel is dropped I have to manually issue the preceding commands
>> again. I know there is a better way to do this, but I can't seem to
>> figure it out yet. Anyone here who could share an l2tpd.conf file or
>> offer any advice I would greatly appreciate it.
>> 
>> Thanks all,
>> Alan
>> 
>> 
>
>-- 
>
>-> Jean-Francois Dive
>--> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>  There is no such thing as randomness.  Only order of infinite
>  complexity.  - _The Holographic Universe_, Michael Talbot
>
>

-- 
Jeff McAdams                            Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Head Network Administrator              Voice: (502) 966-3848
IgLou Internet Services                        (800) 436-4456

Attachment: msg00195/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to