by Hi,
I'm moving to Malden, Massachusetts (a Boston "suburb," though it's not
very suburban) soon and am looking at net access options. Malden doesn't
yet seem to be well-wired for fast net access by cable modem or DSL, but
Bell Atlantic claims they'll have DSL up in two or three months. I was
therefore planning to get a Bell Atlantic dialup PPP account in the hopes
that I won't need to change my e-mail address when I switch from that to
DSL. I got their Windows-based software and set up an account, which has
a banet.net address (unlike most Bell Atlantic discussions I've seen,
which seem to give bellatlantic.net addresses). The problem is that I
can't get it to work from Linux. It works fine from Windows, but when I
try from either Linux (using XISP) or OS/2 I get a message back from the
ISP saying "Error 20 Incorrect account or user ID," followed by an
OS-generated message to the effect that PAP (or CHAP; I've tried both)
authentication failed. The phrasing of this makes me think they may be
scrambling the login names in some unknown way, though I've also messed
with passwords interminably, to no avail. I'm using Red Hat Linux 5.2
with PPP 2.3.5, XISP 2.5p4, and kernel 2.2.0-pre1. I've tried lots of
variations on XISP's entries and the entries in my /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
file. It all works fine with my current ISP (using different usernames,
passwords, etc., of course). Again, I get the same behavior in OS/2 as I
do in Linux, so I don't think it's some obscure Linux config problem.
So, does anybody have any ideas on this?
Alternatively, does anybody know of some other company that's offering DSL
service now (or soon) in Malden that I may have overlooked?
Failing that, if anybody would like to recommend a Linux-friendly dialup
ISP in the Boston area, I'm entertaining suggestions for alternatives,
particularly if I might be able to use them via some DSL setup in the near
future.
--
Rod Smith
http://www.users.fast.net/~rodsmith