ten bytes every nine seconds

[Fred Atkinson]

I have a friend that is running PPPoE via his radio ISP
connection.

He has noticed that his PC is sending ten bytes to his ISP
every nine seconds and receiving ten bytes from the ISP at about the
same intervals.

Does anyone know what is going on with this?

Regards,



Fred

[James Carlson]

Post by Fred Atkinson
I have a friend that is running PPPoE via his radio ISP
connection.
He has noticed that his PC is sending ten bytes to his ISP
every nine seconds and receiving ten bytes from the ISP at about the
same intervals.
Does anyone know what is going on with this?

Does your friend have any network monitoring software or equipment?
He should find out if wireshark (once known as ethereal), tcpdump, or
similar is available. That should reveal what the traffic contains.

At a guess, it's LCP Echo-Request messages, which are used to detect
broken links. Many PPP implementations can be configured to send LCP
Echo-Request messages periodically, and if the peer doesn't respond
with LCP Echo-Reply for some period of time, this means the peer has
stopped running PPP and the link should be torn down.

But without a trace, we're flying blind.

[Unruh]

Post by Fred Atkinson
I have a friend that is running PPPoE via his radio ISP
connection.
He has noticed that his PC is sending ten bytes to his ISP
every nine seconds and receiving ten bytes from the ISP at about the
same intervals.
Does anyone know what is going on with this?
Regards,

Probably a keep alive signal-- ie his computer testing to see if the link
is still up.
man pppd
lcp-echo-* options.
You could always enable debugging and look in the logs.

Post by Fred Atkinson
Fred