Review Request: pptp

[Paul Howarth]

Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Tue, 10 May 2005, Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
> 
>>Regarding patents, I don't believe that the ppp_mppe module has any patent
>>issues, but the alternative ppp_mppe_mppc module does.
>>See:
>>http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/howto-diagnosis.phtml#running_pppd_after_connection
> 
> 
> Okay, looks like encryption's fine, but compression is patented?

That's my understanding.

>>>Packaging of pptpconfig to go with this would be useful too
>>
>>Well, yes, but that opens another can of worms as I mentioned earlier:
>>https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-May/msg00394.html
>>
>>The PHP4 in FC3 doesn't include the pcntl module, and FC4 ships with PHP5,
>>which I believe (I haven't tried it) is incompatible with php-gtk.
> 
> 
> Yeah, I'd forgotten they're in php-gtk. I think the php-gtk plan is to 
> skip over 5.0 and only support PHP5.1+?

I don't know really. PHP-GTK-2 is not yet at "very early alpha" stage 
though (see: http://gtk.php.net/).

What we currently do is to create a separate PHP4 build with pcntl 
support, installed somewhere like %_libdir/php-pcntl, and use that for 
pptpconfig. It's ugly but it works.

>>>>An open source PPTP VPN server is also available, namely PoPToP
>>>>(http://poptop.sourceforge.net/). I may package this for extras too at a
>>>>later
>>>>date if there's demand for it.
>>>
>>>
>>>Given the general broken-ness of PPTP, it might be best not to encourage
>>>people to persist in furthering the use of it :-)
>>
>>Unfortunately some of us have no choice if we need to use $EMPLOYER's VPN.
> 
> 
> Right, and that's where the pptpclient enters in. My point was that it 
> might be best not to package a PPTP server (poptop) because if you do, 
> you'll just encourage people to persist in setting up more PPTP servers.

Understood.

Paul.