[X-Unix] Networking "guru" needed, dialin PPP not working

[Timothy Luoma]

I have a very strange situation going on which has exhausted my  
knowledge of what to try.  I am desperately hoping that someone with  
Unix networking will have a solution, or at least some ideas.

My office LAN is a DSL connection hooked to a Linksys router

                                           |----Office 1 (192.168.1.31)
DSL --- Linksys Router ----|
               192.168.1.1         |----Office 2 (192.168.1.32)
                                           |
                                           |----Office 3  (192.168.1.33)
                                           |
                                           |------My Office ----  
another Linksys router (B)
                                                                         
                      |
                                                                         
                      |
                                                                         
   |---------------|--------------|
                                                                         
   |                                    |
                                                                         
   |                                    |
                                                                         
   |                                    |
                                                                      
FreeBSD                        Powerbook (when at office)
                                                                   
(192.168.1.200)


The 2nd Linksys router (B) has the network cable plugged into one of  
the 4 LAN ports, i.e. it is not seen as a hub, it just acts as an  
"extension cord" letting me plug in 2 machines into the LAN.

The FreeBSD machine is hooked to a phone line which has 'pppd' and  
'mgetty' setup for dial IN access.  When my Powerbook (running Tiger/ 
10.4.1) is at home, I dial in to the office network and get an IP of  
192.168.1.x from the FreeBSD machine.

Here is the problem:

The majority of the time when I dial in to the FreeBSD machine, I  
cannot access the Internet.  In fact, usually I cannot even ping the  
router (192.168.1.1).  I can ALWAYS ping the FreeBSD machine, but I  
cannot ssh into it (the ssh process dies somewhere between lines 4  
and 5 below, after some time in limbo where nothing seems to happen)

1    debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
2    debug2: key: /Users/tim/.ssh/identity (0x3006d0)
3    debug2: key: /Users/tim/.ssh/id_dsa (0x306f80)
4    debug2: key: /Users/tim/.ssh/id_rsa (0x306fd0)
5    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,keyboard- 
interactive

(step 5 shows a successful connection, usually (when it fails) after  
step 4 I see "connection closed to 192.168.1.200")

Here's the real mystery.  If I leave the connection up and running  
and wait, somewhere between 2 minutes and 30 minutes later the  
connection will "come alive" and suddenly it will work flawlessly.

I can sometimes seem to "wake up" the connection by trying to make  
connections (ssh, fetch mail, ichat).

It seems to me (although this is just a guess) that SOMETHING is not  
being initialized properly when the dialin connection is made, but it  
takes awhile for it to get all sorted out.

The problem is that I have no idea where the problem is or what I  
should be trying to solve this problem.


Any help or even educated guesses would be appreciated.

TjL