/dev/ppp can't be opened

Question

Today my VPN, or rather all my VPN services stopped working. While investigating I narrowed it down to pppd, which when I run gives the following error:

[slava@mowgli ~]$ sudo pppd
Couldn't open the /dev/ppp device: No such device or address
pppd: Please load the ppp_generic kernel module.

My immediate reflex was to check for /dev/ppp - it was indeed there.

[slava@mowgli ~]$ ls /dev/ppp
/dev/ppp

I googled for a while and the query "load ppp_generic" leads to a bunch of forums and issues with the same issue but never a response.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/150905/pptp-vpn-client-connectivity-not-working (Already have pppd)

https://github.com/coreos/bugs/issues/313 (Non-answer)

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=66372 (No answer)

And so on.

Any ideas?

Note that I didn't mess with Networking and it worked fine a couple days ago. A reboot might fix it but I want to get to a better fix.

What I have tried (with no success):

• Reinstalling pppd
• Restarting NetworkManager

Solution

Nobody really cared about this question and I couldn't solve it. I DID however find a workaround, or maybe even the proper solution.

To get the VPN service to work, I just allowed each authentication type and disabled point-to-point encryption.

VPN works fine now.

Comments

[Dev]

Hi. Can you elaborate on I just allowed each authentication type and disabled point-to-point encryption?

[Soren A]

It is probably a bad advice just to clear /etc/modprobe.d/modules.conf ... there might be things in that file that are there for a good reason. Always be careful when editing or deleting stuff in system configuration files.

[Typewar]

Might be a mistake from my end. Yes, I do not think it needs to be completely cleared, I'm not sure why I wrote it like that