noauth" pppd snit with kubuntu

I'm giving kubuntu a testdrive and generally find it very worthwhile. But I'm having a bit of a tussle with pppd, compared to other distros like SuSE.

It seems kubuntu really doesn't like the "noauth" pppd option.

Frometc-ppp-options on kubuntu 6.06 ("dapper"):

# Require the peer to authenticate itself before allowing network # packets to be sent or received. # Please do not disable this setting. It is expected to be standard in # future releases of pppd. Use the call option (see manpage) to disable # authentication for specific peers. auth

From the same kubuntu pppd manpage:

auth Require the peer to authenticate itself before allowing network packets to be sent or received. This option is the default if the system has a default route. If neither this option nor the noauth option is specified, pppd will only allow the peer to use IP addresses to which the system does not already have a route.

call name Read additional options from the fileetc-ppp-peers-name. This file may contain privileged options, such as noauth, even if pppd is not being run by root. The name string may not begin with or include .. as a pathname component. The format of the options file is described below. ...

OPTIONS ...

name name Set the name of the local system for authentication purposes to name. This is a privileged option. With this option, pppd will use lines in the secrets files which have name as the second field when looking for a secret to use in authenticating the peer. In addition, unless overridden with the user option, name will be used as the name to send to the peer when authenticating the local system to the peer. (Note that pppd does not append the domain name to name.) ...

user name Sets the name used for authenticating the local system to the peer to name.

This isn't clear to me at all, and I wonder if it's overkill, anyway.

Using the default ("auth"), pppd dies (my ISP sees no need to authenticate).

As a workaround, I tried simply forcing "noauth" in the options file, despite kubuntu advice. That's fine for running pppd directly as root, but not when a mere user tries to run pppd for vanilla dialup (allowed as root only AFAICT).

By comparison, SuSE never had this level of paranoia, it seems.

Frometc-ppp-options on SuSE 10.0:

# noauth means do not require the peer to authenticate itself, this must # be set if you want to use pppd to connect to the internet. In this case # *you* must authenicate yourself to the peer(internet provider), so do # not disable this setting unless you are the dial-in server which where # the peer has to autenticate to. noauth

Polite advice on implementing this (and-or correcting my ignorance) welcome.

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