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[Acronym] for Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol

A technology for creating Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) , developed jointly by MicrosoftCorporation, U.S. Robotics, and several remote access vendor companies, known collectively as the [PPTP] Forum. A [VPN] is a private network of computers that uses the public Internet to connect some nodes. Because the Internet is essentially an open network, the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol ([PPTP]) is used to ensure that messages transmitted from one VPN node to another are "secure". With [PPTP], users can dial in to their corporate network via the Internet.

If you want to support this under Linux, get [PoPToP|http://www.poptop.org/].  It starts a pppd in the correct place; you might be interested in the [MPPE] patches.

PPTP is a great way to get onto the MetaNet (or indeed, any local network) if you're away from it and all you have is a Windows machine.

For firewalling interests. PPTP uses [GRE] packets (protol 47) and a [TCP] connection on port 1723 for control. Most FireWall/[NAT] implementations don't understand the GRE connection identifier and thus will only support one PPTP connection, to a single PPTP server, when your connection is over NAT.  Linux 2.4 doesn't seem to have this problem.

15 pages link to PPTP:

Version 6, saved on Tuesday, April 1, 2003 3:26:41 pm by CraigBox

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