Thank you.
Nicolas, Clifford, Mike, Lazarus, Steve and John for all the valuable
advice. With so many gurus and such a lot of information I just had to find
a solution and I did :-).
The problem seems to be with DNS. When you start "pppd on demand" manually
or automatically on boot up, named is waiting for a look up and so seems to
make the "demand" to fire up the connection. After disabling named the pppd
daemon can be started during bootup (by using activate interface at bootup
in Linuxconf)and demand dialing works fine. So far so good. Now I have a
problem with named :-(. If I start named manually from the prompt the
machine starts dialing out again. So wether you start named first or pppd
first it does not seem to make a difference the ppp on demand fires up in
either case. ( the same problem Lazarus Long had). It also comes back to
the filter rules which Steve talks about. Has anyone solved this one yet ?
Regarding diald I had tried to set up demand dialing earlier using diald.
It is much more difficult to set up (just view the mailing list as I did)
and I found different versions are required for different versions of
linux. For example if you upgraded to RH6.0 the old diald version wont work.
Coming back to the script sent by Clifford Kite I found that I had the same
problem with this script (because of dns). The shell scripts I use for pppd
are found under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts in RH6.0. ifcfg-ppp0 and
chat-ppp0 are automatically generated by linuxconf. They are both activated
by ifup-ppp which inturn is activated by ifup. So to start ppp on demand
connection manually one can go to this directory and just use ./ifup ppp0.
To quit ./ifdown ppp0.
Hope my limited experience helps somebody.
Regards
Rajiv
