Topic: Support for PPTP protocol

[Xavier Lagraula]

Hello.

I am part of the first french users of an ADSL connection to the Internet. As such I'm still using the PPTP protocol and I am quite disappointed to see that it seems not to be supported by e-smith (no pptp package installed, no way to configure it).

I wanted to ask for a new modem to France Telecom so I will also ask to switch to PPoE at the same time. I will then be able to use e-smith, but still there are a lot a french users that go on using PPTP. Some co-workers and friends of mine are interested in using an old computer running e-smith with their cable or DSL connection, but I am afraid that they will experience difficulties because of the lack of support of this protocol.

This is all the more surprising that any Linux distribution now supports PPTP without any difficulty. Even the bugged Alcatel modem that was shipped with the first thousands of connection kit is supported. I myself used a Linux Mandrake 7.1 until now with this lousy modem. I only wanted to switch to e-smith to ease the administration of the servers (ftp, http...).

So I guess it would be a good idea to include support of PPTP in future releases of e-smith. It's hard enough for most people to dare install anything else than Windows, even on an old unused computer, they don't need to be told that they need to change their modem.

[Charlie Brady]

Xavier Lagraula wrote:

> Some co-workers and friends of mine are
> interested in using an old computer running e-smith with their
> cable or DSL connection, but I am afraid that they will
> experience difficulties because of the lack of support of this
> protocol.
>
> This is all the more surprising that any Linux distribution now
> supports PPTP without any difficulty. Even the bugged Alcatel
> modem that was shipped with the first thousands of connection
> kit is supported. I myself used a Linux Mandrake 7.1 until now
> with this lousy modem.

I believe that you are being unfair. As far as can tell, only Mandrake has had support for pptp for any reasonable length of time. And this is not all that surprising, since they are a French linux distributor.

Development of PPTP over ADSL support is not a high priority for e-smith, inc, at the present time, as we have very few subscribers in France. Nevertheless, I have some modules under development which add PPTP support. Please feel free to look in my contrib area ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/charlieb/.

Please note that there is no pptp over ADSL available in my area, so I depend very much on user assistance to develop software support. I'd be very happy to have you offer to do testing for me, and provide good feedback about your success or otherwise.

regards

Charlie

[Franck PIERRE]

Charlie Brady wrote:
>
> Development of PPTP over ADSL support is not a high priority
> for e-smith, inc, at the present time, as we have very few
> subscribers in France. Nevertheless, I have some modules
> under development which add PPTP support. Please feel free to
> look in my contrib area
> ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/charlieb/.
>
> Please note that there is no pptp over ADSL available in my
> area, so I depend very much on user assistance to develop
> software support. I'd be very happy to have you offer to do
> testing for me, and provide good feedback about your success
> or otherwise.

Hi Charlie !

I first apologise for my poor english...

Since there is a long time i haven't contact you, you can have a look at the latest release of my tarball containing everything needed to connect to Internet via PPTP.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/mon-bazard/En_construction/ADSL/Files/config_adsl_pptp.tgz

I know it's still a tgz file, but there is a need to configure some things, so i think a installing script is better than any RPM.

If anyone need more information about this, contact me at ma.boi-boite@wanadoo.fr

Regards

Franck

[Franck PIERRE]

I've forgotten to say that it doesn't well work with e-smith 4.1b3 because of ipchains restrictions (TCP port 47, i guess) and i don't yet know how to modify default rules (i do that manually).

Regards

Franck