I was having problems getting my ppp connection to stay up no-matter-what.

although i kinda solved the problem, i'd like to know why persist didn't
work.

when i added "persist" in /etc/ppp/options, i saw no different than
regular activity; whenever my ISP dropped carrier, ppp script would quit
and pppd would quit, and the connection wouldn't be restarted. i saw a
quick fix to be specifying the disconnect script in /etc/ppp/options to be
ppp-up, and that has been working fine: within 1-2 minutes of the ppp
connection going down, the ppp connection would go back up. why didn't the
persist option do this in the first place? i thought that's what it was
supposed to do. or is supposed to do something else?

thanks,

  - a