Hey. Perhaps your ISP does not require this, they are all different. Who is your provider?

Might be worth trying without and just using username and password.

Otherwise it's possible your terminal is displaying in a weird way. What sometimes helps is selecting all text in your terminal window (whatever you're using to ssh) and pasting it into a text document and seeing if you can find the string in there.

It Trooli Internet.

Yeah it’s all working with just user name and password.

Tried copy and pasting to word and ctrl F helped me find the user / password but no mention of the host uniq details.

Anyhow it’s all working - can’t believe is was this easy in the end when the IST makers such a big deal about it.

Are you in maidstone or around there old callflow deployment?

The original Network build out did not require it which may be why its not there.

I have an identical issue to BritishDrakula with a new Trooli provided Technicolor Router.

top does not take any arguments in the router's version of top so you cannot extend the width of the output from the command and it is always truncated.

It is not possible to use ps to get the pid and then read from the process data under /proc because cat is not a valid command in the locked down router shell when you ssh in.

So far as I can tell it is therefore not possible to extract the host-uniq field as one cannot read the full command line parameters given to pppd.

I think the only alternative left is to use a linux box to run a PPPoE server and Wireshark to sniff out the packets exchanged to find the host-uniq data... unless anyone else has an alternative suggestion?

Edited by psimon63 (Fri 18-Mar-22 14:11:39)

Just to add, I've just tried a Ubiquiti Dream Machine just with the PPPoE username and password and it was able to initiate a PPPoE session without a problem... so perhaps host-uniq is indeed not required for Trooli in some circumstances.

This is on a brand new installation in Sunningdale.

The new altnets don't have much IPv4 address space and are using certain techniques to try and mitigate the shortage. A couple of these have some dependency on the CPE.

It's likely nothing to do with the type of authentication but more the type of address sharing being used.

Hi psimon63,

If you are replacing Trooli Router with something else (in my case, its Linksys), having the User ID and password is sifficient to confgure PPPOE.

Hope this helps you!

How to get your pppd credentials from the Technicolour DGA0122 / DGA4134 / DWA0120:

This works for FTTP CPE supplied by Shell Energy Broadband; the mileage may vary for other providers.

Log-in with ssh to 'engineer' account on the Technicolour:

barrybigballz@debian:# ssh [email protected]
[email protected]'s password:
engineer> [The 12-character admin 'ACCESS KEY' from label on base]
| | o |
|--- ,---. ,---. |---. ,---. . ,---. ,---. | ,---. ,---.
| |---' | | | | | | | | | | | | |
`---' `---' `---' ` ' ` ' ` `---' `---' `---' `---' `
N E X T G E N E R A T I O N G A T E W A Y
--------------------------------------------------------------------
NG GATEWAY SIGNATURE DRINK
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* 1 oz Vodka Pour all ingredients into mixing
* 1 oz Triple Sec tin with ice, strain into glass.
* 1 oz Orange juice
--------------------------------------------------------------------

All Rights Reserved
[..snipped copyright warning etc..]

Issue the 'top' command to see a list of the running kernel processes:

engineer> top

Mem: 223280K used, 26556K free, 296K shrd, 8240K buff, 29180K cached
CPU: 0% usr 3% sys 0% nic 96% idle 0% io 0% irq 0% sirq
Load average: 0.00 0.01 0.00 1/137 32699
PID PPID USER STAT VSZ %VSZ %CPU COMMAND
..
[snipped - long list of processes ..]
..
30687 3551 root S 3324 1% 0% /usr/sbin/pppd nodetach ipparam wan ifname pppoe-wan \
lcp-echo-interval 10 lcp-echo-failure 5 lcp-echo-adaptive nodefaultroute usepeerdns maxfail 1 \
user [email protected] password password \
ip-up-script /lib/netifd/ppp-up ip-down-script /lib/netifd/ppp-down \
plugin connstate.so mtu 1500 mru 1500 plugin rp-pppoe.so \
graceful_restart /etc/ppp/pppoesession_eth4 host-uniq 5093720571927436589234 nic-e
..

And ^^^ there ^^^ we find the PPP username ([email protected]) and the PPP password (which for Shell Broadband is always 'password') and also the Host-Uniq TAG_VALUE. [see RFC2516*]

With those three parameters it should be possible to replace the Technicolour with another model of router, or even by running pppd directly on a host PC.


* From https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2516 :

0x0103 Host-Uniq

This TAG is used by a Host to uniquely associate an Access
Concentrator response (PADO or PADS) to a particular Host request
(PADI or PADR). The TAG_VALUE is binary data of any value and
length that the Host chooses. It is not interpreted by the Access
Concentrator. The Host MAY include a Host-Uniq TAG in a PADI or
PADR. If the Access Concentrator receives this TAG, it MUST
include the TAG unmodified in the associated PADO or PADS
response.

Edited by fibrefrolics (Mon 21-Mar-22 23:11:22)

I was connected in 2020 with a Billion 8900AX router. All I had to do was to go to the dev menu (F12) in chrome and the password was in plain text. 😂

Two years later and I’m still using my amazing Draytek. I used a WatchGuard Firewall for a bit. All worked as expected with PPPoE creds.

Why they don't like us using our much better routers is beyond me.