Be Excellent To Each Other

A friend has just phoned me having trouble getting a router to connect to Pipex. After going through the Setup Wizard, and putting in the username and password, a message comes up saying something alon the lines of

"LCP Down, CHAP authenticiation failed".

CHAP I understand to a point, and my first instinct would be the password is wrong, but I'm assured its copied and recopied from the letter.

What's LCP Down mean? Is it something ISP side? Apparently what happened was the internet connection was working fine but the password to the router stopped working (it's a known fault with the Netgears apparently) so a hard reset was done and now it doesn't work, at all. I would have thought it was just a case of putting in the name and password and it'll do the rest but apparently not.

If anyone has any thoughts on the issue or has had it before I'd be mighty glad to know.

I'm also glad I have cable and I just plug it in and let it go.

Link Control Protocol. I think it is at your ISP's end, but the best way to be sure is phone their support desk.

It's shut on Sundays.

I imagined LCP to be part of their "things to worry about" but the fact it happened suddenly after a router reboot seems odd.

Unless LCP just does the initial handshake and then buggers off? So the router could have been online fine, but can't re-log back on?

My theory at the moment is there's a stale session on the ISPs network which isn't getting timed out and therefore not letting the router back on properly.

I guess it'll have to wait until tomorrow for an ISP guy to look at it though.

If he's previously been connecting through a modem then plug that back in and see if he can log back in that way -- then you'll know.

It's a modem/router unfortunately, so it's that or nothing.

No I mean when you join Pipex they can send you a USB modem, but if he never bothered with that then I guess he won't have that fall-back. The only other things I can think to check are that he's using his proper log-in name (mine's so similar to my email addy that I've tapped that in instead before now) and that he hasn't confused his user name with the router's encryption key or something. Doubt it's either of those but might as well mention them as not.