I've finally decided to just get DSL installed at home.  I have
mosue-pppoe installed, but don't know how to get it to authenticate.  (My
DSL account isn't activated yet; it's supposed to be turned on by December
5th...so I can't directly test anything, yet.)

My question is about authentication: Does mouse-pppoe use the same
pap/chap stuff that the regular ppp would use?

(The provider, if it matters, is Prodigy (no comment) through Southwestern
Bell.  I spoke to a tech who had a friend using FreeBSD with it, so they
aren't doing anything _too_ strange.  He also insisted that pppoe was
pppoe, so any pppoe interface that I have should be okay.  (fingers
crossed)  But, of course, the package that I received just has
instructions that assume you are running BillOS and want to blindly run
the installation/configuration software on their CD's.  When I called them
directly for information---like about what authentication they use---I got
someone who seemed helpful and friendly, and said that they couldn't
support every platform because they required a special protocol that
MS-WINDOWS and the Mac had.  Something strange and exotic called
``TCP/IP''.  (^& After I (twice)  explained that that wasn't a problem,
she basically bailed saying that it should work---but since my account
isn't active yet, we couldn't test it and see what problems might emerge.)


Anyway.  I don't have anything except the physical DSL ``modem'', some
cables, and filters to put between phone jacks and regular phones.
(Well, there's a coversheet thrown in for MS-WINDOWS XP which apparently
can't use all of the standard installation software either.  There's a
generic account/password to use to get online and register a new, custom
account/password.)

My assumption is that I need to put something like this in
/etc/ppp/(p|ch)ap-secret:

* * <password>


(I need the *'s since my IP is going to be dynamic, and I have no idea
what the name of the remote server is...or much else, for that matter.)

Is there a better way of doing this with pppoe?  Or do I have to do
something else?


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu