options in plugins?

options in plugins?

[Greg Stark]

I'm not sure if development on pppd is still active. It seems there are dozens
of patches floating around and no upstream releases coming. Is it? Is this
still the list to reach the upstream maintainers?

My question is whether there's a way to add options in a plugin. It seems the
options list is a static array in plugins.c and plugins are loaded using
dlsym. So unless I've missed some piece of infrastructure there isn't.

This is really unfortunate. My ultimate goal is to make the timeouts and
retries in pppoe configurable just as they are for LCP. Currently they're set
to 5s with unbounded exponential backoff and a max of 3 retries. That makes
any temporary outage of even about 30s result in a complete failure.

I've hacked my personal copy to just retry every 5s forever but in an ideal
world there would be a pppoe-restart and pppoe-maxfail just like lcp-restart
and maxfail that could be set in the options or peers files.

But I don't see any reasonable way to do that without writing a lot of code.
Nor am I clear whether such a patch would eventually get released. There's not
much point in writing it just for myself -- I have my personal version hacked
up for my use already. If development is dead then there's not much point in
fixing this problem so generally.

-- 
greg

Re: options in plugins?

[Grant Coady]

Hi Greg,
On 10 Jul 2005 13:10:18 -0400, Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>I'm not sure if development on pppd is still active. It seems there are dozens
>of patches floating around and no upstream releases coming. Is it? Is this
>still the list to reach the upstream maintainers?

It is a very quiet list, I emailed someone last year to see if they 
taking patches and no response.  Only monitoring this group couple 
weeks, seems little traffic, holiday season?
>
>My question is whether there's a way to add options in a plugin. It seems the
>options list is a static array in plugins.c and plugins are loaded using
>dlsym. So unless I've missed some piece of infrastructure there isn't.
>
>This is really unfortunate. My ultimate goal is to make the timeouts and
>retries in pppoe configurable just as they are for LCP. Currently they're set
>to 5s with unbounded exponential backoff and a max of 3 retries. That makes
>any temporary outage of even about 30s result in a complete failure.

I wish I knew more of the pppoe <-> ADSL linkup as sometimes it 
takes a long time to establish a connection.  
>
>I've hacked my personal copy to just retry every 5s forever but in an ideal
>world there would be a pppoe-restart and pppoe-maxfail just like lcp-restart
>and maxfail that could be set in the options or peers files.

What scripts are you using?  I'm using rp-pppoe to drive the connection, 
dunno what other ways there may be.
>
>But I don't see any reasonable way to do that without writing a lot of code.
>Nor am I clear whether such a patch would eventually get released. There's not
>much point in writing it just for myself -- I have my personal version hacked
>up for my use already. If development is dead then there's not much point in
>fixing this problem so generally.

Scratch your itch, see if anyone else agrees with solution?

Perhaps some like me, mostly have working connection, sometimes 
problems, it aint too broke to worry about?  

Another issue perhaps is that users may not be comfortable 
testing pppoe code on firewall box?  Mine is running 2.4 kernel.  

Cheers,
Grant.

Re: options in plugins?

[David Ananian-Cooper]

hi,

yeah - you definately can add options in a plugin.

define a global static option_t array in your code:

e.g.

static option_t options[] = {{"optionname", o_string,
&variable_name, "Description"},{"option2name",
o_string, &variable2_name, "Description2"}, ... ,
{NULL}};

(o_string is the option type - there are some other
ones - i forget which pppd source file to look in for
the list and i don't have a copy of the source on hand
atm. Also, there has to be a {NULL} entry to denote
the end of the list)

then include an add_options(options); command in your
plugin_init().

I think all you need include is pppd.h.

As for development, as far as i can tell, there is
still development going on. I've been suscribed to
this list for a few years and it is very low traffic.
I'm guessing development is done somewhat as an
exclusive club kinda thing.

hope this helps.

cheers,

David

--- Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:

> 
> I'm not sure if development on pppd is still active.
> It seems there are dozens
> of patches floating around and no upstream releases
> coming. Is it? Is this
> still the list to reach the upstream maintainers?
> 
> My question is whether there's a way to add options
> in a plugin. It seems the
> options list is a static array in plugins.c and
> plugins are loaded using
> dlsym. So unless I've missed some piece of
> infrastructure there isn't.
> 
> This is really unfortunate. My ultimate goal is to
> make the timeouts and
> retries in pppoe configurable just as they are for
> LCP. Currently they're set
> to 5s with unbounded exponential backoff and a max
> of 3 retries. That makes
> any temporary outage of even about 30s result in a
> complete failure.
> 
> I've hacked my personal copy to just retry every 5s
> forever but in an ideal
> world there would be a pppoe-restart and
> pppoe-maxfail just like lcp-restart
> and maxfail that could be set in the options or
> peers files.
> 
> But I don't see any reasonable way to do that
> without writing a lot of code.
> Nor am I clear whether such a patch would eventually
> get released. There's not
> much point in writing it just for myself -- I have
> my personal version hacked
> up for my use already. If development is dead then
> there's not much point in
> fixing this problem so generally.
> 
> -- 
> greg
> 
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> 

Re: options in plugins?

[Paul Mackerras]

Greg Stark writes:

> I'm not sure if development on pppd is still active.

Yes it is still active, although slow.

> It seems there are dozens
> of patches floating around and no upstream releases coming. Is it? Is this
> still the list to reach the upstream maintainers?

It'll do. :)

> My question is whether there's a way to add options in a plugin. It seems the
> options list is a static array in plugins.c and plugins are loaded using
> dlsym. So unless I've missed some piece of infrastructure there isn't.

There are two ways a plugin can add options.  The first is to call
add_options, and the second is to set the_channel to point to the
plugin's channel structure, which can have a pointer to an array of
channel-specific options.

> I've hacked my personal copy to just retry every 5s forever but in an ideal
> world there would be a pppoe-restart and pppoe-maxfail just like lcp-restart
> and maxfail that could be set in the options or peers files.

Just add them to the Options[] array in pppd/plugins/rp-pppoe/plugin.c.

Paul.

Re: options in plugins?

[James Carlson]

Grant Coady writes:
> On 10 Jul 2005 13:10:18 -0400, Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> >I'm not sure if development on pppd is still active. It seems there are dozens
> >of patches floating around and no upstream releases coming. Is it? Is this
> >still the list to reach the upstream maintainers?
> 
> It is a very quiet list, I emailed someone last year to see if they 
> taking patches and no response.  Only monitoring this group couple 
> weeks, seems little traffic, holiday season?

It's a fairly quiet list most of the time, as the code base is fairly
mature.

There ought to be a FAQ on getting changes integrated with a given
project, as it seems to be an obscure art.  In short, just sending a
bunch of diffs to the maintainers rarely (if ever) works.  The sorts
of things we want to know are:

  - What exactly are you doing?  Are you fixing a problem you saw or
    adding a new feature?  If it's a problem, what are the symptoms
    and can it be reproduced?  If it's a new feature, how does it fit
    in with existing features, and why were the existing features "not
    enough" to do what was needed?

  - What testing have you done?  Have you checked for memory leaks?
    Have you checked for compatibility with other implementations (if
    necessary)?

  - Are you _sure_ this is the right fix, or are you just soliciting
    comments?  Is there perhaps a bigger (and unfixed) problem lurking
    behind this one?

It's not that it's some sort of "club," but if we don't know who you
are and what you're doing, it's not always clear what to do about the
bags of bits we sometimes get.

> >But I don't see any reasonable way to do that without writing a lot of code.
> >Nor am I clear whether such a patch would eventually get released. There's not
> >much point in writing it just for myself -- I have my personal version hacked
> >up for my use already. If development is dead then there's not much point in
> >fixing this problem so generally.
> 
> Scratch your itch, see if anyone else agrees with solution?

As others have pointed out, this feature already exists.  No need to
scratch anything.

-- 
James Carlson                                 <carlsonj@workingcode.com>