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PPTP endpoint

Project ID: 
77
Current stage: 
Manager: 
Unit: 
What: 

Description: This project is defunct. PPTP authentication is basically
broken

Was: Investigate and perhaps implement a PPTP endpoint.

Deliverables: (1) report on pros and cons of PPTP and poptop; (2) if found desirable,
set up an endpoint, either on a machine of its own or sharing with the
OpenVPN endpoint.

Why: 

Customer: Generally useful, particularly for Windows users.

Case statement: There's a background trickle of people who would like to connect to inside
the Informatics perimeter using Windows's built-in PPTP VPN. This project is
to investigate how much of a case there is for this; and if so, to
implement it.

Note that we abandoned a previous investigation into PPTP a couple of years
ago, following kernel module difficulties which may have been resolved now,
and the following posting by one of the poptop developers:

   My recommendation to people who ask me is;

   1.  do not implement PPTP between open source systems, because there's
   no justification, better security can be had from OpenVPN or IPsec,

   2.  do not implement PPTP servers unless the justification is that the
   clients must not have to install anything to get going (Microsoft PPTP
   is included already), and be aware of the risks of information
   interception,

   3.  do not implement PPTP clients unless the justification is that the
   server only provides PPTP, and there's nothing better that can be used,
   and again be aware of the risks of information interception.

   Has anyone any idea how we can phrase this sensibly on the respective
   PPTP open source web sites?  ;-}
   -- 
   James Cameron                         http://quozl.netrek.org/
   HP Open Source, Volunteer             http://opensource.hp.com/
   PPTP Client Project, Release Engineer http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/
When: 

Status: Pending.

Timescales:

Priority:

Time:

How: 

Proposal:

Resources: Possibly a machine to run the end-point on, depending on the outcome of the
initial investigation phase.

Plan:

Other: 

Dependencies:

Risks:

Milestones

Proposed date Achieved date Name Description
2009-09-03 pptpPrelim Preliminary investigation into PPTP and poptop