Hey Folks.  My buddy's got a shiny newWL500gP with 707 (2.4) loaded, sitting on his PPPoE line and running well .. mostly.

The router stops responding to the net.  He comes home, in a flurry, and reboots the toaster before the wife gets home (and kills the project).  All is well.  Repeat once or twice a day (no pattern yet).

He's going to go back to WR within the day, but I wanted to know:
- anyone else seeing this?  Are you on Earthlink (via Mindspring) and NOT seeing anything hinky with PPPoE?
- is WR really as abandoned as I fear?
- My regional telco uses DHCP over DSL.  Why do some idiot companies get to use crappy MTU-munging hacks without dying?

Okay, the last one is optional.  I'm used to having more choice, and maybe some people in the third world and the eastern US don't have that choice, and I feel for people like them.  Thanks for your eyeballs, and any help you can provide.

- bish

The lack of responses give me hope, and suggest to me that the number of people inflicted with PPPoE is a small and relatively treatable number.  Like polio, maybe one day the disease which is PPPoE can be eradicated!

My buddy hasn't gone to Cable yet, nor has he gone to WhiteRussian.  If you have any suggestions or input, worry not that the opportunity has passed you by.  Anything you can suggest to help us get a handle on this problem would be appreciated -- I'd like to prevent going back to WR, just because I get the feeling that it's completely unloved, these days.  Barring suggestions, I'd well-receive any word of confidence about WR's PPPoE kit:  I'm of the opinion just yet that a problem which is fixed in KK707 may have existed since long before, and may or may not have existed in WR09 with no similar fix on the horizon.

A little bit off topic but why do you thing PPPoE should be eradicated?
AFAIK every provider in germany uses PPPoE. So it would be a great problem for
us to use OpenWRT any longer ^^

The only problem I noticed with pppoe with 7.07 is that ifup wan will crash the router while ifup wan with 7.06 just reconnectes as it is supposed.

With best regards
p90

Why?  DSL without PPPoE is possible, usable, and it gives a full 1500 MTU;  I'm using 3 WRTs on DHCP-over-DSL now, and they're rock-solid. 

A shortened packet size gives the exact same problems when loaded as when one mixes jumbo frames and non-jumbo frames;  especially over long or latent links.  When DF is on but PMTU is buggy, full packets will simply drop and be left to the endpoints to eventually work around.  That means lots of extra retransmits and dupe acks in addition to the extra load and throughput drop which precipitated jumbo frames (and the savings) in the first place.

But I'm actually glad that a whole nation of Germans (renowned as much for an eye for detail as much as for confidence) must use PPPoE, because I now have millions of people with a similar setup.  And here the forum said only a few people had read this post before it was piled under 2 dozen more posts!

And I'll easily accept any scorn for denigrating PPPoE to read a potential gem like this one.  So you're saying that, perhaps, the Fix delivered to PPPoE for 707 may have made it less reliable?  Would you recommend we try 706 instead?  Under which bug was that reported, so I can track it?

I have Kamikaze running on a WRT54GS v1.0 & Earthlink DSL (via Covad).  I had lots and lots of PPPoE reconnects until I disabled keepalive completely.  My record for having the same IP address (with Thibor) was 23 days.  Since I made that change to /etc/config/network (commented out keepalive), I'm on my third day with the same IP.

*crosses fingers*

Are you running 706 or are you on 707?  I'm curious because of the PPPoE fixes that went into 707 seem to cause a few problems as well as fix others.  If you're on 706, I'd rather my guy go on the same, just to minimize differences in code.  And then he'll stay there forever, if it works!  Crossing one's fingers indeed!

Thanks for your feedback.  Thanks a heap -- and if anyone else is reading, I'm still open to anything from kibbitzing to complete success stories.