Sarel J. Botha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I wanted to reply to your mail. I'm sorry that I'm only replying now.
> I think your problem might be related to the ++ATH0 command thing. ++ is
> the command used to make your modem listen for command and ATH0 makes your
> modem hangup, so if the data ++ATH0 goes over a modem line it might
> disconnect. This usually only happens with buggy modems.
The modem doesn't disconnect, as far as I know. After the PPP crash
certain control packets are still sent, according to the log. But no
network traffic gets through.
> > I just tried it with kdebug 65535. For a while it was working fine,
> > with copious debug in /var/log/. Then the debug suddenly stopped
> > appearing. Mysteriously, PPP continued to work for a couple of
> > minutes. Then it stopped working, as usual. (I was repeatedly doing
> > cvs update to provoke the problem.)
>
> This is pretty weird.
This (the log stopping) only happened once, so it's probably an
irrelevent syslog strangeness: on this occasion something got sent to
syslogd that switched the logging off, perhaps. I don't really trust
syslogd, particularly after I noticed what happens if the logged data
happens to contain "%m"; ppp.c contains a work-around for a related
bug in printk/syslogd.
> > About a minute earlier, something very weird was logged in
> > /var/log/messages:
> >
> > May 17 19:04:03 rano kernel: ppp_ioctl: set flags to f1f0003
> > May 17 19:04:03 rano kernel: ppp_ioctl: set maxcid to 16
> > May 17 19:04:03 rano kernel: ppp_ioctl: set flags to f1f0007
> > May 17 19:12:41 rano kernel: ppp: error in VJ decompression
> > May 17 19:15:44 rano kernel: 2F /README/
> > May 17 19:15:45 rano kernel: 6E .6///.Un
> > May 17 19:15:57 rano kernel: P_SUBDIR
> > May 17 19:16:05 rano kernel: gdb, n
> > May 17 19:16:11 rano kernel: clrt
> > May 17 19:16:50 rano kernel: i
>
> It looks like there's a bug in the kernel driver or pppd. What versions are
> you running?
I've reproduced the basic problem with several versions, including
2.3.99-pre7 with the latest pppd from the Australian ftp site, but
mostly I run Debian potato packages, and that's what the logs are
from.
Anyway, I can see the origin of the stuff in /var/log/messages.
Basically, some debug log is missing, and the log starts again in the
middle of a line. Since the "<N>" is missing, the mutilated line goes
to /var/log/messages rather than /var/log/debug.
Although mutilated lines appear in /var/log/messages at the same time
as PPP crashing, I can't be sure the two are directly connected.
Perhaps they are both because of the same bug (some unwanted
reentrancy or whatever), but maybe both are merely independent
consequences of a heavy load.
Two other things associated with the crash:
Quite a lot of short "receive buffer"s shortly beforehand. (Maybe just
another sign of momentary heavy load.)
The string "I LOVE YOU." appearing amid unidentified binary data in
the log. (This is weird, because I can't think where this string comes
from. But it can't really be relevant, can it?)
Edmund
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