I don’t know how many of you have heard about this term called “PPPoE” which stands for Point-to-Point-Protocol over Ethernet. Even though this article is not intended to explain in detail about this protocol, in order to have a general understanding let’s go through the common concepts of PPP and PPPoE briefly.

PPPoE as a derivate of PPP
Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a data link protocol used to establish a direct connection between two nodes. It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption and compression. PPP is also used over internet access connections. Two derivatives of PPP, Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) and Point-to-Point Protocol over ATM (PPPoA) are most commonly used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to establish a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) internet service connection with customers. The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) is a network protocol for encapsulating PPP frames inside ethernet frames.

Establish a PPPoE connection
This would normally require a authenticated DSL connection via phone line, trunk line, optical fibre etc. So I would assume that you have this DSL connection as a pre-requisite. Once you have it, now its all in our control. We can either authenticate via Ethernet or WLAN, whichever is easily accessible for you at your home/office. Make sure that you have the following packages installed:
* ppp
* rp-pppoe
* net-tools
* initscripts
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this article, Fedora does not provide a nice GUI interface for creating and establishing PPPoE connections. But that’s not a problem for Linux guys, right? Where there’s a shell there is a way. The first thing we need to do is to create a custom config file for our connection. For this we make use of pppoe-setup command and execute the same without any arguments.

# pppoe-setup

Now you will be guided through a serious of prompts which helps you in creating the file ifcfg-ppp0. If you are not sure on some questions make sure that you get away with default settings as shown below:

[1] Enter your Login Name (default root):
Enter the username received from your ISP.

[2] Enter the Ethernet interface connected to the PPPoE modem
Provide the interface name on which you have connected to the DSL connection. For example if you have used an ethernet cable, run ifconfig to get the interface name(mostly it will emX, where X will be a number). For Wi-Fi connections it may be something like wlp3s0 etc.

[3] Do you want the link to come up on demand, or stay up continuously?
Press Enter

[4] Please enter the IP address of your ISP’s primary DNS server
Unless and until you are provided with ISP’s DNS address you are advised to type ‘server’ without quotes here and press Enter

[5] Please enter your Password:
Enter the password corresponding to the username mentioned above.

[6] Please re-enter your Password:
Re-type the password.

[7] Allow normal user to start or stop DSL connection?
Press Enter

[8] Firewall choices:
If you are not sure on how firewall services and rules work, type 0 followed by Enter

[9] Do you want to start this connection at boot time?
Press Enter

[10] Accept these settings and adjust configuration files (y/n)?
Type ‘y’ and press Enter

Now you must have seen the folowing message displayed with some additional details of configurations.
“Congratulations, it should be all set up!”
The only thing remaining is to activate the connection. For activating the connection,

# ifup ppp0

When you are done, don’t forget to deactivate the session by running,

# ifdown ppp0

Happy surfing… !!!