10.3. Installing Poptop on Fedora Linux

Problem

You have a gaggle of Windows clients on your LAN, and no available Windows servers or nice VPN routers, so you want to set up a Fedora Linux-based VPN server running Poptop to allow remote access to your LAN.

Solution

The easy way is to use Fedora 5 or newer. Then, you'll have kernels with MPPE support already, so you can get down to the business of installing and running your Poptop server.

Make sure you have MPPE support:

	# modprobe ppp-compress-18 && echo success
	success

Check your ppp version:

	$ rpm -q ppp
	ppp-2.4.4-1.fc6

Oops. This won't work, and must be replaced with a 2.4.3 version. Remove it:

	# yum remove ppp

Then, download and install the matching RPMs from Poptop's download site on Sourceforge.net (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=44827). The current releases are ppp-2.4.3-5 and pptpd-1.3.4.

Then, configure pptpd to start at boot in the usual way with chkconfig:

	# chkconfig pptpd on

Note that the pptpd daemon is controlled with the usual /etc/init.d/pptpd [start|stop|restart|status|condrestart] commands. A small gotcha is only stop will completely shut it down and close all sessions, so you must stop and start it for a complete restart.

Now, you're ready to move on to configuration.

Discussion

You must have the correct ppp version, or your pptp server will not work. At the time this was written, the documentation was a bit unclear on this, and different Linux distributions did not package pptp with a dependency on the correct version of ppp. For more information, see Recipe 10.10.

See Also