Phil Oester wrote:

>On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 08:34:57AM -0800, Phil Oester wrote:
>  
>
>>It's a great idea, and will reduce the size of struct ip_conntrack.
>>But I think it should be done in a separate cleanup patch - really would
>>like to get this one merged up to fix the masq issues.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually masq_index is still used in connect_unassure, and thus can't
>be removed completely.  In cases where the interface goes down permanently,
>clearing the assured bit makes sense, so guess this behaviour should be
>maintained.
>  
>
You're right. I have to admit, I'm not too happy about the unpredictable
behaviour we get with this patch and multiple ppp devices. So one last
attempt to convince people. The old behaviour was to kill conntracks once
the device goes down. I think killing conntracks when the IP is deleted
makes more sense. Since the IP has to be deleted manually, except when
the device goes away, people can simply not delete IP addresses for
devices that don't go away, than nothing will get removed. pppd can be
taught to keep the device alive. The attached patch adds a program
alloc-ppp to pre-allocate ppp-devices and teaches pppd to attach to them.
The device never goes away, if ppp doesn't delete the IP address the
conntracks won't be killed. It could easily be integrated in a more handy
way in pppd. So this could also be done entirely in userspace, without
the unpredictable behaviour.

Regards
Patrick