A friend of mine was wondering how to obtain his PPPoE username and password for his connection to centurylink / qwest.

There’re two different routes, you can do a complete router reset by holding down the reset button on the back of the device, and then after your modem reboots you can open up a web browser and it should take you through an automated setup, with how they currently have the system in place.  There’s a point in the setup that will show you your PPPoE username and password, I simply saved this document to my dropbox so I could reference it for later use.

The other method is to use telnet.  I was inspired by this post: http://www.muchtall.com/2009/03/11/4-2/ and even more so by this comment left to that post: http://www.muchtall.com/2013/05/23/recovering-the-ppp-username-and-password-from-a-centurylink-actiontec-c1000a/.

So if you have a different modem than the PK5000 and you are trying to get / recover the PPPoE username and password to your centurylink / qwest modem / router, those posts above  might be of help for you, especially if you have an Actiontec C1000A.

Lets Begin

To start you will need to enable telnet on your modem.  You can do so by opening up your gateway page often: 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 – I would explain how to do / find this, but if you’re looking to obtain your PPPoE username and password you hopefully know about your gateway address :P.  Under “Advanced Setup –> Remote Management –> Remote Telnet” you can enable telnet and set a username and password, and as always remember that stuff, it’s going to be important and required for the upcoming steps.

You will need telnet for the next step. If telnet is not found in your cmd here’s an article about enabling it on Windows 8: http://www.sysprobs.com/install-and-enable-telnet-in-windows-8-use-as-telnet-client

If you have issues getting telnet to work through Windows you can always try Putty

You’ll use the command: telnet 192.168.0.1 (whatever your gateway IP is)
It will then ask you for the username and password that you set up in the settings.

Next you’ll need to type the command: ps
This will display all the running processes for the modem.

You’ll need to find the line that has “/usr/sbin/pppd plugin pppoe nas0 user qwestUsername@qwest.net”
It will be cut off since they only display 80 characters or so.

Then look at the leftmost column, it should be some random number, which is the process ID.
Write this down somewhere for the next step.

Now enter: cat proc/(PROCESS_ID)/cmdline
ie: cat proc/742/cmdline

This should spit something out like:

/usr/sbin/pppdpluginpppoenas0userQWEST_USERNAME@qwest.netpasswordPASSWORDnodetach
pppoe_ses_id0defaultrouteusepeerdnsmru1492maxfail10lcp-echo-failure4lcp-echo-int
erval30#

And there you have it, it will display your PPPoE username and password, which the password will be found between “password” and “nodetach”