How to Configure your Linux PPP connection for PAP logons

The best reference on this topic is the Network Administrators' Guide, part of the Linux Documentation Project. In the following example, NIC is the name of my internet service provider. Please replace that with the name of your ISP when writing your configuration files.

As an example, here's what I did:

• First, I create a file named pap-secrets in the /etc/ppp directory containing the following:

  # user          server          secret          addrs
  cheah           nic             xxxxxx
  

  The item under secret is the NIC password. You can have multiple lines in the pap-secrets file if you have another PPP dialup provided by your employer, for instance.
   
  
• Where my NIC dialup shell script starts PPP, the pppd line looks like this:

  pppd remotename nic user cheah
  

  The user and remotename on the pppd command line tell it where to find the password in the pap-secrets file. They correspond to the user and server columns in the sample pap-secrets file above. If you will not use PPP for anything other than NIC, you can place the user and remotename options in your .ppprc file.

Note that since your password has to be stored as plaintext in the pap-secrets file, you should set the permissions on that file so that it is not readable by everyone unless, of course, you are the only one using your Linux box.

Back