Wednesday 24 January 2007

pppoe testers needed (ppp-udeb)

(Stop the tests for now, it seems I made a mistake. Will fix it tonight and make an update.)

I have been working recently on an update to the ppp-udeb package (responsible for configuring PPPoE networking in D-I and the target system).

I think I have finished fixing the last bad bits from the ppp-udeb package[*], but currently I am unable to do a test of a complete installation due to bug #407702 in qemu. Still, I am confident it should just work.

So I am asking if there are people interested in testing the image I have prepared with the new ppp-udeb package. The image can be downloaded from:



http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/ppp-2.4.4rel-5/mini-with-ppp-udeb-20070124.iso



(Security concerned people can check the signature and md5sums and go on, if they trust me :-) )

How to test

In order to test, just boot the image (no boot parameters are needed) and try to do a basic installation via PPPoE.

What should be (or would be nice to be :-) ) checked:

  • in D-I environment
    • bad/good login should be detected (good logins are silent)
    • transitory problems when trying to do the initial connection (cable unplugged or PPPoE server down) should be detected
  • in the installed system:
    • target system boots fine with the PPPoE connection set up correctly
    • hosts file and host name are set correctly
    • permissions are set correctly on the network configuration files and the ppp configuration files (an output of "ls -lR /etc/ppp" in the target would be appreciated)
    • loopback interface is configured correctly
Please respond as soon as possible (eddy.petrisor at_sign gmail.com).

[*] I did some tests myself but I can't test everything due to bug #407702 in qemu; some screen shots I made in qemu can be found at http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/ppp-2.4.4rel-5/screen%20shots/


Update: thanks to some people that did the test, I found out that I made some wrong assumptions in my code. I will make another image tonight and make another call. This will hopefully fix the issue.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just tested it with Taiwan's hinet.net (ADSL, 2Mbps/256Kbps).

Bad news, man: did not work for me. Here's what I did:

- just pressed 'ENTER' at the installation prompt, no parameters
- chose language, timezone, keymap etc.
- all my network hardware ( 3 real network cards - out of which only one is connected to DSL line - and a firewire port which was also detected as 'eth3' ) were correctly detected.

- ppp-udeb started scanning for a concentrator on eth0, eth1 and eth2, correctly found one on eth1

- I gave it a good login, but bad password

- it correctly failed to connect, but the error message leaves much to be desired - it simply said something along the lines of 'unhandled error occurred' when in syslog it says clearly that

pppd[6327]: Remote message: AccessReject Username or Password Wrong

- I came back to the menu and selected 'establish PPPoE connection' once more

- I again gave it a bad password

- It DID NOT FOUND A CONCENTRATOR AT ALL THIS TIME!!! probing in eth0 was normal, but in case of eth1 and eth2 was just once packet and then an abort

- I came back to the menu again and selected PPPoE.

- it found the concentrator this time, ( but on eth2?? Did it rmmod the drivers in the meantime?? what for?? )

- again I gave pppoe-udeb a wrong password

- it failed to connect

- I came back to the menu again and again selected PPPoE connection. Found the concentrator on eth1. This time I gave it the correct password

- it failed to connect, although syslog says the authentication was successful this time, it received IP, gateway, two DNS servers, everything correctly - but then it failed with an 'unhandled error'

- it should be noted that 'pppoeconf' has no problems at all connecting to my DSL so the problem must be in ppp-udeb


- the complete syslog of the whole installing session can be found here:

http://www.3miasto.net/~leszek/syslog.pppoe

( it's edited at one point during the end to hide the IP it gave me, the IP of the gateway and two DNS servers )

- my email is leszek@3miasto.net

Thanks for your work, I am really interested in PPPoE support in d-i. Up till now I had to either download the whole installation CD1 or do tricks with installing from a Ubuntu Live CD with deboootstrap.

Looks like you do not support all possible answers from the PPPoE server, thus the 'Answer unknown' messages, and also you rmmod the network drivers in between connection attempts so numeration of my 3 network cards changes.

eddyp said...

- it correctly failed to connect, but the error message leaves much to be desired - it simply said something along the lines of 'unhandled error occurred' when in syslog it says clearly that

pppd[6327]: Remote message: AccessReject Username or Password Wrong


Yes, I made a wrong assumption in the code which led to the message not being recognised. Now should be fixed with the latest test image.

Please test with that:

http://users.alioth.debian.org/%7Eeddyp-guest/ppp-2.4.4rel-5/mini-with-ppp-udeb-20070124-1.iso

- It DID NOT FOUND A CONCENTRATOR AT ALL THIS TIME!!!

Yes, I have seen this behaviour during my tests, no matter the version of pppd/rp-pppoe. It seems that sometimes the concentrator is not seen, or the response is delayed too much and timeouts are received. I don't know why that happens, but further attempting the search has serious chances to be successful.


This time I gave it the correct password

- it failed to connect, although syslog says the authentication was successful this time


Yes, this was a result of the wrong assumption I made and fixed. This issue should be gone now.


- I came back to the menu again and selected PPPoE.

- it found the concentrator this time, ( but on eth2?? Did it rmmod the drivers in the meantime?? what for?? )


This is weird, and looking at the syslog, indeed I see this weird behaviour. I don't know why this happened, but this is not related to ppp-udeb while it could be something related to udev. I'll report this further.