From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: James Cameron Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 04:00:26 +0000 Subject: RFC: PPP MPPE merge into kernel 2.6 Message-Id: <20040130040026.GI2306@hp.com> MIME-Version: 1 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="jRHKVT23PllUwdXP" List-Id: To: linux-ppp@vger.kernel.org --jRHKVT23PllUwdXP Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I'd like to open a discussion on the merge of the PPP MPPE support with kernel 2.6. What can be done to achieve it? What is hindering it? What can we do to remove the roadblocks? MPPE is Microsoft's encryption scheme for PPP links. The Linux MPPE support consists of five new source files, and patches to ppp.c, ppp_generic.c and ppp-comp.h, and can be found in the CVS repository for the PPP project in linux/mppe. The patches are relative to 2.2 and 2.4. See http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/ppp/linux/mppe/ The author is Frank Cusack , and the code is covered by the "BSD without advertisement clause" license. Frank released this around March 2002. See http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/ppp/README.MPPE MPPE support is used by PPTP. People who wish to use PPTP on their system often have to modify their kernel to add MPPE support. PPTP is not a particularly good tunnelling protocol, but many people are required to use it as a condition of employment. In particular, MPPE is not applied to non-data packets in the PPP stream, apparently by design. Many distributions do not ship MPPE support (e.g. Red Hat). Some distributions have shipped an older version of MPPE support covered by the OpenSSL license, which is incompatible with the kernel license (e.g. SuSE, Mandrake). Some provide a patch (e.g. Debian). The PPTP projects have adapted to the lack of MPPE support in the upstream kernel by providing custom kernels, version specific patches, module build scripts, and even binary modules. =20 Since the release of 2.6.0, two or three people have provided me with patches relative to 2.6. The OpenSSL licensed MPPE support was a separate implementation, and was provided as a patch to 2.4.1. This was adopted by SuSE and Mandrake for their kernels, but is incompatible with the MPPE support in the newly released PPP 2.4.2. It would be good to unify this situation and remove some of the pain. Some effort has also been put into MPPC support, but as MPPC is covered by a patent I'm not proposing that. I'm the PPTP client project leader. -- James Cameron http://quozl.netrek.org/ HP Open Source, Volunteer http://opensource.hp.com/ PPTP Client Project, Release Engineer http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/ --jRHKVT23PllUwdXP Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: Digital signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAGdbaIiWKUhK+Mj4RAv10AJ9B+DYjpxhX4jc26XjpbClBzTP3vgCeOxEk RmLSOGh/3JwwsCYQB/S/Ygk= =XDgb -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --jRHKVT23PllUwdXP--