10.5. Note on PPP-2.x and /proc/net/dev

If you are using PPP-2.x, you will find that a side effect of the 'on the fly' creation of the PPP devices is that no devices show up if you look in the /proc/net file system until a device is created by starting up pppd:-

[hartr at archenland hartr]$ cat /proc/net/dev Inter-| Receive | Transmit face |packets errs drop fifo frame|packets errs drop fifo colls carrier lo: 92792 0 0 0 0 92792 0 0 0 0 0 eth0: 621737 13 13 0 23 501621 0 0 0 1309 0

Once you have one (or more) ppp services started, you will see entries such as this (from a ppp server):-

[root at kepler /root]# cat /proc/net/dev Inter-| Receive | Transmit face |packets errs drop fifo frame|packets errs drop fifo colls carrier lo: 428021 0 0 0 0 428021 0 0 0 0 0 eth0:4788257 648 648 319 650 1423836 0 0 0 4623 5 ppp0: 2103 3 3 0 0 2017 0 0 0 0 0 ppp1: 10008 0 0 0 0 8782 0 0 0 0 0 ppp2: 305 0 0 0 0 297 0 0 0 0 0 ppp3: 6720 7 7 0 0 7498 0 0 0 0 0 ppp4: 118231 725 725 0 0 117791 0 0 0 0 0 ppp5: 38915 5 5 0 0 28309 0 0 0 0 0