[PLUG] pppoe experience sharing (fc4,5 vsnl metro-ethernet)

[Mayuresh]

Got Tata Indicom (vsnl) broadband connection "working" on fc4 some time back
and recently on fc5.

There is ample help available on steps to get pppoe working in PLUG threads
as well as elsewhere. Just want to share some observations.

Following could be seen by enabling debug option of ppp:
Apologies for a longish post.


- The server challenges with CHAP authentication, ppp resonds to it but the
response gets rejected by the server. In short CHAP authentication always
fails. (Not sure about the reason. Everything is right with chap-secrets.
It's same as pap-secrets and PAP authentication always succeeds.)

- If chap secrets are commented out or settings are made to reject CHAP
authentication request, pppoe requests PAP authentication to server while
refusing CHAP. After this server terminates the connection saying "Peer
refused to authenticate"

- If you allow this process to continue, within some random amount of time,
the server somehow asks for PAP authentication which immediately succeeds.

- This time varies from anything like 1s to a couple of hours! It took a lot
of frustrating hours of trying to tweak the options before realizing that
leaving the adsl-connect/pppoe-connect process running as it is for a while
connects it.


If anyone has managed to get it working for above configuration, without
facing above issue, please do post your experiences.



Overall experience with the vendor:

By and large satisfied with the speed. Support is extremely poor and of
course absent for Linux. Don't recollect them getting back on any query they
promised to get back on. Initial setup experience wasn't at all swift and
smooth. Took a lot of hassles to get the balance transferred from a dial up
a/c I held with them.

Mayuresh.