Does anyone have a pptp VPN connection working?

[icekool]

I would be very grateful if anyone could let me know if they have a PPTP VPN connection working reliably with the latest Mageia. I have seen a couple of bugs that mention probs with MPPE support with Mageia.

I have had to dump Linux recently due to not being able to connect to my VPN service of choice, this was, however, in Kubuntu, Mint, openSUSE. I also tried different DE's including MATE & CINNAMON, all useless in the several latest versions. I did have a working reliable VPN setup in a much older version of Ubuntu (10.10) but don't want to bother re-installing something so many years old.

So, I was thinking of trying Mageia, but won't bother if no reliable VPN connection facility.

I have found it almost impossible to know for sure if this issue is down to each distro itself or the DE, my DE of choice is KDE and I know that there is the KDE Plasmoid Network Manager, which worked many versions ago, but since KDE 4.9x + no joy. I know it's not down to my basic settings as I have used the same VPN for years and it works flawlessly everytime in Win 7.

If it works in Mageia, I will give it a try immediately.

Any replies, greatly appreciated, thank you.

[doktor5000]

I have had to dump Linux recently due to not being able to connect to my VPN service of choice, this was, however, in Kubuntu, Mint, openSUSE.

So none of those had PPTP working?

Apart from that, has recently been discussed in viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5288

[wintpe]

this site seems to be the best available for documentation across a whole range of linux's

http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/

However for me openvpn works perfectly and i have no use for proprietry microsoft protocols.

so wont be testing it any day soon.

Mageia is definitly one of the easiest of the uptodate linux's to work with.

if you are having trouble on other linux's as well, then its a good place to get it working.

things dont always work as you hoped on each and every linux distribution, because so many componants change at each rev, and people dont

test and feedback problems with the betas, they wait till the full release is out to winge about options that dont work (myself included).

so you will find this either a burden or a challenge, its upto you, you might have to spend some time understanding it.

look at my post about openvpn, the principle is the same, ie you route your network via a virtual network device, could be tun0, could be another.
that network device is an end point to a tunnel just like ssh, that you use as if you had two network cards.
you need to ensure your routing tables are correctly setup to allow the connections detined for that vpn network to route via that tunnel.
you need to check to see that the firewall is not treating that as another network card and appying iptables to it, as it does with openvpn.
you need to see that the pptp daemon that acts like ssh, can establish a connection via any firewall to the destination listening daemon
on the vpn server. nc is a good tool to test network connections between two points, as is telnet.
ifconfig -a will show you if the tunnel gets established, as you will see a device other than eth0, or wlan0 which might be tun0, not sure in the pptp case.
one thing is for sure, if you set this up via the command line, you will easily be able to implement it on any linux distribution, by entering the commands you
used in a script.
hope this helps.

regards peter


ps ive just checked the basic docs , to establish what support is in mageia 2

Code: Select all

[root@localhost ~]# modprobe ppp_mppe
[root@localhost ~]# lsmod|grep ppp_mppe
ppp_mppe               13036  0
ppp_generic            33065  1 ppp_mppe
[root@localhost ~]# modinfo ppp_mppe
filename:       /lib/modules/3.4.45-desktop-1.mga2/kernel/drivers/net/ppp/ppp_mppe.ko.xz
version:        1.0.2
alias:          ppp-compress-18
license:        Dual BSD/GPL
description:    Point-to-Point Protocol Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption support
author:         Frank Cusack <fcusack@fcusack.com>
srcversion:     6A5CE8D947D7C37F9EBE4B7
depends:        ppp_generic
intree:         Y
vermagic:       3.4.45-desktop-1.mga2 SMP mod_unload modversions
[root@localhost ~]#

[root@localhost ~]# urpmq pptp
No package named pptp
The following packages contain pptp: fusiondirectory-plugin-pptp, knetworkmanager-pptp, networkmanager-pptp, pptp-linux

[root@localhost ~]# urpmi pptp-linux
To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed:
  Package                        Version      Release       Arch
(medium "Core Release")
  ppp                            2.4.5        6.mga2        x86_64
  pptp-linux                     1.7.2        5.mga1        x86_64
1002KB of additional disk space will be used.
396KB of packages will be retrieved.
Proceed with the installation of the 2 packages? (Y/n)