On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 06:16:49PM +0100, Christian Biere wrote:
> BTW, I've just notice "clear-auth-failure". Can you really use this to
> reset the failure counter on the remote side? Does this mean the
> support guys telling you "OK, that's it for today - try again tomorrow"
> are liars or just clueless?

No, it removes the counter in your interface that tries to prevent that
"go away, come back tomorrow" situation.

The support guys are right, if you exceeded the retry count. I've run
into this in two situations

 - after changing my password via my providers web interface and
   forgetting to reconfigure the pppoe interface, so it ran into
   the 9 failed retries situation when the connection was disconnected
   after 24 hours

 - while setting up a new connection with a typo in the password

It's a pity that some providers help desks are not able to clear that
counter in their management system.

Probably the best thing to do if you are sure your connection is configured
correctly, or you have a cluefull provider, is to set max-auth-failure=0, and
not forgetting to change it whenever you change passwords ;-)


Martin