Alcatel SpeedTouch 330 USB + FreeBSD 5.2.1 + PPPoE -- a nightmare!

[Hugo Silva]

Hi,

Today I went to a friend's house to install FreeBSD on his workstation,
trying to make him change to open source software. I am a cable user and
he has ADSL. I had never configured ADSL on FreeBSD, nor USB connections
to the net. So I did some pre-reading on the handbook and some tutorials..

I took an old 3GB hdd I had with me. Since he only has one computer, I had
to constantly change the hard disks to boot windows & FreeBSD (just
installed on the 3G disk). I downloaded alcatel's firmware, the pppoa
port, compiled bridging support on the kernel, tap device..

I had never touched ppp even, my times on dialup were on windows 95.

After 6 hours lost (I though the connection was PPPoA.. wrong), I called
the ISP techy support and they told me the protocol used is PPPoE. Right.
So I did a quick reconfigure on the ppp.conf file. Without pap or chap
(which, from what I understood, is the authentication scheme) it will say
my friend's login is already in use. I was really happy to see that,
finally after almost 7.30 hours a response from the server! (up until then
I was being promptly disconnected). So I enabled pap&chap, and expecting
an established connection to the net.. this is what I get:


Too many LCP REQs sent - abandoning negotiation

Aug 28 19:54:51 kittenizer ppp[627]: tun0: Phase: deflink: Too many LCP
REQs sent - abandoning negotiation

Ok.. There I unplugged the freebsd disk, plugged his winxp disk, did a bit
googling for the 20th time or so.. Few results came up. I tried lowering
MTU& MRU to 1492, disabling extra options, set cd 5 , among others.

I don't have the ppp.conf file here, but it only had the authkey,
authname, login, dial, PPPoE:tag0, all the essentials from a working
config I found on the net from a guy who could get the connection working
on this ISP, although I digged most of the options by the time I found
that thread.


All I know is LCP stands for line control protocol. The only idea I had
(after leaving his house) was trying to disable LQR, which, from what I
understood, is somehow related to LCP.

Another possibility is the service tag missing? I understand the format is
PPPoE:tag0:service_tag_here , but I have no idea of what the service tag
is. Would a missing stag cause the LCP error ?

Finally, there was someone saying the old user-land ppp version would work
whilst the new one caused this same problem to him.

I will be going to his home next week again, hopefully with some answers.
Shame I don't have a test connection, as I stated on the beginning of this
mail I run on cable (dhclient rl0 is WAY EASIER :D).

Please excuse me if I missed something obvious on the configuration, but
as I said I'm completely new to both PPP & ADSL.


Many thanks in advance!