Linux (ubuntu 10.04) ppp maxfail 0 and persist not working? (WORKAROUND)

I've been wondering for a while why, after an upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, the ppp daemon on my router/server had stopped automatically reconnecting after it lost ADSL line sync or otherwise had its connection dropped.

The culprit turns out to be a helper script (/etc/init/network-interface.conf) in upstart that tries to handle hotplugging of network interfaces, automatically bringing them up when plugged in and down when unplugged.

Unfortunately, it views ppp interfaces as hot-plugged, and helpfully calls ifdown on them when they dissappear after a connection is lost. This kills pppd, preventing it from creating a new ppp interface and trying to connect again.

Unlike most interfaces, ppp interfaces are created and destroyed as a consequence of ifup and ifdown calls. Well, really pppd invocation, but that's usually done via ifup/ifdown these days. Calling ifdown when a ppp interface vanishes isn't always wrong, but it's wrong if the pppd is set to "maxfail 0 persist".

As the script isn't smart enough to know that, and I don't hotplug interfaces on my router anyway, I've opted to simply disable the script in question by renaming it to /etc/init/network-interface.conf.disabled. That'll be broken whenever the upstart package is updated, though, so a better solution is required.

Unconditionally ignoring all ppp interfaces in the script isn't necessarily right, as it would be nice to ifdown them cleanly when the pppd has exited and is thus no long retrying. It's hard to do that reliably as the interface is destroyed before pppd actually terminates, and it's hard to query pppd to find out if it plans to quit or retry. Arguably the retry logic should be moved out of pppd and into upstart or network-manager, but with the state of those tools at this point that's a recipe for pain and suffering.

In the mean time, you can work around it by disabling the problematic init script.