Um, "1.6 STABLE"?  I never really paid attention to the "STABLE" stuff.
I ran with (plain) 1.6 and ADSL, with SBC here in Texas (using a 5360
modem as you have).  I never had the problems that you describe.  (I
*did* see something about LCP, I recall, from time to time.  But my
kernel never died.  I just had to reset my connection.)

It may be worth switching to the old 1.6 release if you need a stable
operation.  (Unless "STABLE" *is* the 1.6 release.  Again, I don't know
how such things actually work out...)

Of course, if you have time to explore this behavior and fight with it,
doing so may help to debug the OS.


I also used, under NetBSD 1.5.2, the mouse-pppoe from pkgsrc.  This doesn't
use the in-kernel PPPoE support, but works fairly nicely.  (I adapted my
old dial-up PPP setup in a few minutes to use mouse-pppoe.  The only problem
was that dial-up PPP supports the "defaultroute" option to automatically set
the PPP device as the default route.  mouse-pppoe accepted the option but
silently ignored it,  it seems.  I worked around that with a script that
delayed a few seconds for the connect, then used AWK to pull out the IP number
on the other side of the connection and set that as the defaultroute.)

mouse-pppoe should work under 1.6, I'd think.  Some people have also recommended
rp-pppoe as a subsitute for mouse-pppoe.  I never saw the need to give up what
already worked, though.  (^&


Another option is to upgrade to a static IP setup.  For an extra few
dollars per month, SBC will give you 5 IP numbers and static IP.  Their
tech support is fairly clueless in my experience when you ask them what
you need to change (they know enough to tell you that PPPoE is no longer
used).  What it boils down to is that your modem just looks like an adapter
for an ethernet cable, then, and you configure your system to talk to the
SBC gateway on the other end of the connection, using regular ethernet
configuration.  (No PPPoE.)  As a plus, you get a /29 subnet (which,
unfortunately, gives up one if its 6 usable addresses for SBC's gateway).

I switched to static IP shortly before leaving SBC altogether for a
smaller, local provider that actually seems to have its act together.
But, that's drifting off of the topic.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  --rkr@olib.org