"Disconnecting..." forever

[texanpenguin]

I'm on a PowerBook G4 with a dial-up internet connection.

My ISP has four hour sessions, before you get automatically booted from the server, to free up modems.

Every now and again (not EVERY time, but many), when either the session expires or the internet is disconnected for some other reason (noisy line, someone calls that line, etc), the menu-bar status for the modem scrolls the word "Disconnecting..." indefinitely. The only way to get the computer to allow me to RE-connect is to restart the computer. Logging out doesn't work.

The connection is sometimes shared to the Built-in Ethernet port.

My PC-using brother delights in seeing my Mac do this, because it means it's restarting four or five times a day on occasion, when it used to have an uptime of over two months. I've repaired permissions more than once, and done a scour of the net, no luck.

Any help? Suggestions? Ideas?
Even just a process I could kill to turn the modem on and off without having to restart?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I see your sig says you're running 10.3.4, but is there a chance that's out of date and you're actually running 10.3.5? Many people have had problems with dial-up connections under 10.3.5...

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?...40910080240174

[ora]

I used to get this before i moved to adsl. I never worked out how to fix it, but i found that if you disconnect the phone cable from the computer, after a couple of minutes the system realises its not connected and brings up an error message. After that you can dial up again. Dull, but probably quicker than restarting.

ora

[texanpenguin]

A) No, still running 10.3.4, didn't get 10.3.5 because it's too big to download on dial-up and people have been having so many issues with it. Come to think of it, this might have started with installing 10.3.4 over 10.3.3

B) I'd love ADSL, mainly because there's NO disconnecting involved. Pulling out the phone line doesn't work to stop the disconnecting loop.


Reading the system log in Console makes it seem like the computer is trying to open pppd before it's finished disconnecting, which, to me, sounds like a bad thing to do.

Can anyone with UNIX experience think of a reason not to just

kill pppd

Next time it happens? Will this cause any lasting damage?

[Viro]

killing a process shouldn't cause any lasting damage. I do that all the time.

[Da_iMac_Daddy]

If you don't mind using the terminal, I think, reading the manual for the commands ps, and kill will help you solve your problem. Also I don't know if this goes for OS X but on other linux distros you can either use the shutdown command with some option for a quick reboot. Maybe someone with more *BSD experience can shed some light on the situation?

[edit]
Maybe a search on the forums for quick reboot or something like that will return some helpful results.
[/edit]

[sonjay]

There's a program called "End Hanging Disconnect" that solves this problem. I can't remember where I found it, but a search on VersionTracker, or Google, should turn it up.

[texanpenguin]

Wow !

Thank you SO much sonjay - you saved the day .

Looking at the documentation, it looks like it just kills the pppd process five times, but still - it's got a GUI - saves me doing it each time


Thanks again - I owe you .