28.7. Setting up the global alias for pppd

In order to simplify things for our dial up PPP users, we create a global alias (in /etc/bashrc) so that one simple command will start ppp on the server once they are logged in.

This looks like...

alias ppp="exec /usr/sbin/pppd -detach"

What this does is

• exec : this means replace the running program (in this case the shell) with the program that is run.

• pppd -detach : start up pppd and do NOT fork into the background. This ensures that when pppd exits there is no process hanging around.

When a user logs in like this, they will appear in the output of 'w' as...

  6:24pm  up 3 days,  7:00,  4 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU  what
hartr    ttyC0     3:05am  9:14                -

And that is it...I told you this was a simple, basic PPP server system!