Debian 4 and PPP

Yes­ter­day the latest release (4.0) of Debi­an came out. I decided to be big and brave and upgrade imme­di­ately; I’ve nev­er had any prob­lems with upgrad­ing Debi­an before and did­n’t expect to now. It took forever to down­load, ages to install (with me keep­ing all the old con­fig files as I always do). And then, at the end, our inter­net con­nec­tion was dead. Our inter­net con­nec­tion is via PPP, which was tricky to set up, so it seemed best to tackle the prob­lem in the morn­ing rather than risk mak­ing things worse.

This morn­ing I found that the ppp script in the /etc/init.d dir­ect­ory was­n’t there, but a #ppp# script was, with the right con­tent. So I renamed the file back to ppp, checked the backups to put the right sym­links into the vari­ous /etc/rx.d dir­ect­or­ies, and rebooted. Voila! An inter­net con­nec­tion. Now I just have to fig­ure out why apache2 isn’t run­ning. [Update: because it was upgraded to ver­sion 2.2 and the authen­tic­a­tion con­fig file syn­tax was changed, that’s why.]

I have no idea wheth­er the PPP prob­lem came from the dis­tri­bu­tion, or some­thing odd in my con­fig­ur­a­tion (although I’ve done full dist-upgrades before with no prob­lems). I did a hunt on the Debi­an wiki and found that Debi­an has added more PPPoE sup­port recently, so maybe there was a clash in there some­how. I’m glad I was para­noid enough to make backups of the /etc dir­ect­ory to com­pare with. At some stage I guess I should fig­ure out wheth­er to replace the cur­rent con­fig­ur­a­tion with the new Debi­an sys­tem, although I don’t like muck­ing about too much with things that actu­ally work, espe­cially when it comes to some­thing as vital as being able to con­nect to the Net.