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Routed and PPP

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

After removing a number of server programs from a RedHat 6.0 box, I found that routed would no longer exchange routing messages over the PPP link.

Platform

This was a RedHat 6.0 box.

Solution

Pay close attention to the manual page for routed. It says that it scans available interfaces at startup to determine whether to participate in the RIP routing protocol. The routed process wasn't routing because at the time it scanned the interfaces, there was no PPP interface. A fully loaded RedHat system will delay the start of routed sufficiently from the start of the PPP connection that routed starts with the PPP interface up and waiting to be scanned.

Since I removed many of the intervening server startup scripts, routed was now starting and looking at the list of interfaces before PPP finished dialing. Introducing enough delay to make the PPP interface available solved the problem.

Notes

A better solution would be a script that actually watched the interface and waited for PPP to come up before running routed. As it stands, if the PPP dial-in number is busy for a while, routed might still not see all the interfaces.