Unwanted PPP dialup during boot sequence

[Richard Smith]

Norman Buskell wrote:
> 
> I have set up FreeBSD to act as the default gateway for a small PC/Mac
> network. The dialup link is working fine, apart from the fact that PPP
> tries to make a connection each time I re-boot the server. My PPP
> configuration file includes filters to prevent ICMP and NetBIOS packets
> from triggering a dialup. Does anybody have an idea what else could be
> happening?

Put something like:

    set log Phase Chat LCP IPCP CCP tun command TCP/IP

into your default profile in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf and you will see the IP
packets causing the dial-up event in your /var/log/ppp.log file. This
generates a lot of log data so beware.

If you have named running on that machine, DNS lookups are the most
likely candidate. If you have a newish version of named, it will `touch
base' with it's forwarders or the root servers (depending on how you
have it configured) and I haven't found a satisfactory way to circumvent
this behaviour other than downgrading to an earlier version (8.1.2 to be
precise).

If it _is_ DNS lookups causing the problem, you could try adding:

    named_flags="-q"

to your /etc/rc.conf file and:

    !named
    *.*		/var/log/named.log

to the _bottom_ of your /etc/syslog.conf file, _and_ don't forget to
touch /var/log/named.log before rebooting, and you will see the names
that are being resolved.

If you have sendmail running on that machine, it does a reverse DNS
lookup on your host name as it boots up. This is easy to thwart with a
suitably constructed primary table. More about that later :-)

HTH
Richard.

P.S. if you decide to leave these log files in, you will want to add
them to /etc/newsyslog.conf to prevent galloping /var growth.