Re: Totally frustrated by gnome-ppp

["James M. Cape" <jcape jcinteractive com>]

Roger Vaughn wrote:
> 
> Ok, gnome-ppp is frustrating the hell out of me.  Maybe someone can
> help.
> 
> After the tips posted here the past couple of weeks, I had the thing
> working perfectly.  Then suddenly, without reason, it starts acting up
> again.  I haven't installed anything new or changed my config in any
> way.  In fact yesterday, it worked during the day, then suddenly refused
> to work last night.
> 
> What happens is the the pppd daemon dies *immediately*.  I get the first
> status message in the window - "pppd started." - and immediately after
> get the message box "pppd died unexpectedly".  The debug window is of
> course absolutely no help in this situation.
> 
> kppp works flawlessly using the exact same setup.
> 
> What's going on here?
> 
> This is a cute plus, too.  After this has happened, if I hit the close
> window ("x") button on gnome-ppp, it takes my entire GNOME session down
> - all the way back to the xdm screen.  Hardly a desirable feature.
> 
> BTW, this is running nearly the latest GuruLabs builds on RH 6.0.

Try tailing /var/log/messages when you do this. PPPd typically cannot
run as root, and will complain about it to syslog if you try. This was
causing me some problems with gnome-ppp at first.

Making /usr/sbin/pppd owned by root.dip, setuid to root, and only
executable by the dip group (and then adding my user to the dip group)
was the solution:

-rwsr-x---    root  dip

    Jim Cape
    http://www.jcinteractive.com

    "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them
     pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
        -- Winston Churchill