Explanation of the used options
In this section I’ll explain in more detail what each option does. You can safely skip to the next page if you don’t care what everything does.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| idle 0 | This prevents the ppp damon from killing the connection after after a specified period of inactivity. |
| noauth | Do not require the peer to authenticate itself – we’re pretty sure the only thing on this network is the modem (not to mention the fact that the modem does not support this). |
| user $USER | Obviously, use the login we just specified in the pap-secrets file. |
| usepeerdns | We ask the modem to tell us the addresses of the dns servers of the network he connected to. These addresses will be passed along to the connection scripts when we start the uplink. |
| defaultroute | As soon as the connection is initiated we set the remote gateway as our main gateway in the route table. |
| linkname adsl | This is an optional argument which provides us with a pid file in /var/run as long as the connection is enabled. You can create scripts which use this to check if the internet connection is up and running. |
| persist | When specified, this makes sure the connection is reinitiated as soon as it gets dropped. In a way your downtime should only be a second or so while the daemon restarts the uplink if something went wrong. |
Note: my internet never cuts out on me so I have no clue how well persist works if you use it on a highly unstable uplink.