Re: pptp daemon?

[Dave Tyson <dtyson%liv.ac.uk@localhost>]

> Back about a month ago, I wrote
> 
> >> I've been tasked with estting up a PPTP server, [...]
> >> 
> >> I've done some poking around, but everything, even the link on the
> >> NetBSD networking how-to page, seems to lead to
> >> http://www.mreriksson.net/howtos/netbsd-pptp-server/, [...]
> 
> dtyson replied (spurious line break in URL patched up manually)
> 
> > Should be on the internet archive:
> > 
> > http://web.archive.org/web/20070828010016rn_1/www.mreriksson.net/howtos/n
> > etbsd-pptp-server/
> 
> This was a substantial help (thank you dtyson!) and got me part of the
> way there, but I'm having trouble still/again.  The historical
> mreriksson.net page says poptop 1.0.1 and ppp-mppe 2.3.9.  There is no
> ppp-mppe package now as far as I can tell; mppe-lkm is the closest I
> could find.
> 
> The machine is NetBSD 5.1 i386.  I have installed poptop-1.3.0 and
> mppe-lkm-0.0.4nb2 (from source; mppe-lkm appears to be unavailable in
> binary form, and I prefer to have source on hand in any case).  This
> involved also installing digest-20080510 and gmake-3.82nb1, though I
> doubt either of them is relevant.
> 
> It still doesn't work.  I made sure the LKM was loaded at boot time
> (and modstat, after the machine is up multi-user, shows it, so I have
> little doubt it worked).  But trying to start a PPTP client talking to
> it fails with errors like
> 
> Mar 21 11:58:00 potato pppd[566]: LCP terminated by peer (MPPE required but
> not available)
> 
> Clearly I've done something wrong, or not done something I need to, or
> some such, but so far I've been baffled as to what.  I'll be digging
> (this is one reason I wanted to have source on hand), but, in the
> meantime, does anyone have any pointers[%]?  I suspect the ppp-mppe the
> mreriksson page refers to is relevant, but, as I said, I can't find any
> such package now; the only packages I see with mppe in their names are
> audio/mppenc and net/mppe-lkm: the former is a false positive and the
> latter is installed.  I see four packages with ppp in their names, none
> of which look likely to be relevant (net/mouse-pppoe, net/pppd,
> net/rp-pppoe, and net/userppp); do I need one of them?
> 
> I'm considering wading into the code with a machete, both to get that
> stupid LKM compiled into the kernel (I really really dislike LKMs,
> especially on world-facing machines - removing LKM support is normally
> one of the first things I do) and to figure out just what is going
> wrong with the MPPE negotiation and how to fix it.  But if it's just a
> PEBKAC issue, it would help immensely for someone to point out just
> _how_ it is.
> 
> Thoughts?

A long time ago (circa 1992) I tried to get pppd working with MPPE. IIRC we 
were trying to setup a secure wireless connection for laptops running windows 
and decided if we could do end-end encryption then it would be better than 
WEP. I messed around for some time with MS-CHAP  and MPPE but just couldn't 
get NetBSD to work - The exact cause of failure is lost in the mists of time. 
I then tried with l*nux and although the MPPE part worked fine we had troubles 
with routing of all things. In the end we brought a commercial solution. 

There are version of ppp on sourceforge which has support for MPPE builtin, 
but it currently only supports Solaris or Linux and hacking it to work on 
NetBSD is probably going to be time consuming... I did have a look on the 
wayback machine to see if the origonal ppp-mppe.2.3.9 was available, but sadly 
I couldn't find any archived mirrors containing it.

Dave

-- 
=====================================================================
Phone: 07805784357
WWW:   http://www.liv.ac.uk/~dtyson
Open Source O/S: www.netbsd.org
Caving: http://www.wirralcavinggroup.org.uk
=====================================================================