I've seen a similar issue on a box I maintain. However, "persist" is not the relevant option here. (That stops pppd from exiting immediately when the peer drops the connection, so it is working.)
I found that the relevant option is "maxfail 30". Change this to "maxfail 0" and pppd will never stop trying to re-establish the connection, which is what you want. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org