What is a PAP authentication failure?

[interio]

My ADSL was been down since Thursday. I tried logging into Afrihost and Webafrica accounts, then the Telkom guest account and could not connect to anything. I tried 2 different modems and with the same result. My line synched and that never seemed to be a problem. Telkom came out today, claimed everything was fine, and suddenly it was fine and I got online no problem. Now I looked at the router logs and see that the error it was showing was "PAP authentication failure". I googled it but the explanations are a bit over my head. Anyone experienced this and can explain what it is? I'm just curious about what actually happened.

 

[davemc]

PAP is an authentication protocol. It's just saying that your login or password are incorrect.

PPPOE can use PAP or CHAP authentication protocols, for some reason we seem to all be using PAP.

But, if Telkom's guest account was failing, I suspect that the real problem was that they had somehow plugged your line into a port that is not being routed through the authentication servers, and when they fixed it, they moved your line into a different port.

 

[interio]

Thanks! The ISPs weren't even seeing failed login attempts from me so I knew it wasn't a wrong password issue.
Oh well, at least being offline meant I had a work-free weekend!