could not determine remote ip address

who knows about the IPCP negotiation of ppp?
I've searched in this and other newsgroups for this error message:
    Could not determine remote IP Address,
but did not find a solution. Got this message when trying to start pppd.

Just before this message it gives in the debug log:
    rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x2 <addr 62.59.16.49> <compress VJ 0f 01>

Finally, I found out that when I specify on the command line the local and
remote IP address, that it will work. If I only specify the remote address,
it works as well. For example, I can ping the remote server.

Why does it say that it cannot determine the remote IP address, while it
just has received the ACK for the IP address?

And, how is it possible that I can work fine while I selected myselves the
remote IP address? I would guess that the other side would reject that I
myselves select an IP addres, and that all routing would go wrong...

If needed, I can dump the /etc/ppp/options file or let you know the other
debug entries (those are just less then a couple of 30 lines, I believe.

Michael