Penguin
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So, you want to run a PPTP server? Possibly you want to do this to allow a poor lonesome Windows machine somewhere to access MetaNet via a VPN. This page will contain a hopefully relatively complete and coherant set of notes to help you get a PPTP server running using poptop, an open source pptp server for Linux (http://www.poptop.org).

Server setup

First, the installation and configuration of the server. This is a relatively simple matter. The package pptpd contains the poptop server in Debian, and the defaults are reasonable, save for adding your IP range to /etc/pptpd.conf. Also, Debian has defaults in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets which allow users with a /etc/passwd entry to authenticate with ppp. These didn't seem to work out of the box, for some reason, so you may need to manually add a user and password pair in there in the standard pap-secrets format (user * password * or something similar).

(put something about required modules here please? I just used Debian default kernel and it Just Worked).

If you have a firewall, you have to pinhole port 1723 TCP and GRE to the server running pptpd.

Client setup

Assuming you have a Windows 2k/XP client, this is a simple matter. Make a regular VPN connection, entering your pptpd server's IP to connect to. Also, flick through and turn off encryption and encrypted passwords for now (you may need to dig in an advanced setting dialog or something, at least in XP. Don't let it put you off). You may want to go to TCP/IP settings and turn off the default route. If you do this, you will probably have to set up additional routes in Windows. I don't know how to do this and make it stick (someone should possibly put this here too).

If your Windows machine is behind a firewall, you need to put through similar pinholes. Port 1723 TCP to the machine connecting to pptpd, and GRE to that machine too.

Then put in your username and click connect -- all should be go.

Getting MetaNet to work

This requires some routing trickery on the machine running pptpd. I don't really know the details, so I'm probably extremely badly qualified to tell you about it. Please AddToMe. Or AskIsomer.