All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

ifup, ifdown, ifanywhichwaybuthtewayiwant

Ovid on 2004-07-07T22:22:55

Every once in a while, I type 

ifup ppp0

and instead of the normal connection noise on my external modem, I hear garbage and the modem lights (which I have no docs for) set into odd patterns and I can't connect. Subsequent connection attempts usually return an error message similar to 

Failed to activate with error 6 (sometimes it's an error 35)

Trying to do

ifdown ppp0

or 

/etc/inet.d/network restart

seems to have no effect and I have to reboot the box to clear the error. ifup has no documentation and reading through the ifup script provided no clues. I hate error codes. I hate, hate, hate error codes.

I hate error codes.

Been a long time...

phillup on 2004-07-07T23:28:00

It has been a while (thankfully!) since I've used a modem, but maybe this will help.
man pppd
on my machine shows error 6 as not being able to get a lock.

It took a bit of googling... but, after looking at this, I think the error 35 is where the script can't find a pid file. (You may not even be using this code... but I couldn't really find a reference to the error code 35 elsewhere.)

Anyways... I'd almost bet that sometimes when you ifdown, it doesn't always clean up the lock file.

This is all just a wild ass guess... but, I'd look in /var/lock and make sure there isn't a left over lock file for the modem device.

Beats rebooting...

Re:Been a long time...

Ovid on 2004-07-08T17:35:13

Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at that.