Re: What's causing my demand ppp to connect?
"Randy Orrison" <randy@orrison.com> wrote:
>
>
> I'm a relative newbie to Linux and Debian (though in a former life I was a
> Unix sysadmin). I've installed potato r3, upgraded to 2.2r4, and had my
> pppd working fine, dialling out on demand at reasonable and predictable
> times. Now I've upgraded to woody and it's dialling out every 5-10 minutes,
> then hanging up after the idle timeout. I've looked at all the /var/log/...
> files I can think of to find out why it's dialling out, but I can't find any
> activity in any of the logs that would explain it trying to connect.
>
> Without going into all the gory details of what's installed and running, is
> there some log I can look at (or request) that will give me the pid of the
> process that's connecting to a non-local IP address and causing ppp to dial?
>
> Thanks!
>
I don't know if I can answer your question without further details on
your setup, but maybe the following will point you in a general
direction to look for the answer.
The basic "problem" is you Demand Dialer is being triggered by something
wanting an outside connection (bet you have already figured that out
<g>). The usualy suspects when this happens apparently independently
are DNS queries or attempts to get E-Mail from an outside server.
Actually, the E-Mail request involves a DNS lookup too most of the
time. I had one instance in Corel Linux where a dhcp client would
always "trigger" a dial-out on boot up. This can be a hard problem to
track down, and often proves to be a quite serious exercise in Deductive
Reasoning! <g> I have even tried shutting down various add-on
"services" not needed for the basic functioning of the system (like
Exim, Apache, Samba, etc), to find the one that might be causing the
dial-out.
The fact that this happens on regular intervals would point to some sort
of E-Mail query, IMHO. It also could be a result of a CRON job.
In addition to this computer's Mail programs (Exim, Sendmail, Fetchmail,
etc.), I would suggest you check ALL your E-Mail CLIENTS (Netscape,
Outlook, KMail, etc) that have a capability to be setup to check for
E-Mail automatically every few minutes. You should check ALL the
computers on your LAN for this condition, as any computer on a network
behind an IPMasq machine with Demand Dialing setup "should" be able to
trigger a dial-out. A simple way to see if it is another computer is to
disconnect the others and see if it still happens. You can hook them
back up one-by-one to narrow it down to the culprit.
A while back, my son was running a Napster-like program that checked his
favorite sites periodically. He never told me he had it running & the
first "clue" was un-explained dial outs.
I would also check all your CRON scripts and make sure they are setup
the way you want.
Finally, take a look at the Demand Dialing scripts to see if there is a
"re-dial" option that is set. It may be named something else.
HTH & Cheers!
-Don Spoon-
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