*BSD News Article 71397


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From: dwatson@abwam.com (Darryl Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: Plans for CHAP/PPP in BSDI?
Date: 18 Jun 1996 15:04:50 GMT
Organization: ABWAM, Inc.
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <4q6gii$rsv@hops.entertain.com>
References: <4p533b$6qm@agate.nbnet.nb.ca> <31C5A3B1.616@cet.co.jp> <31C4F08A.41C67EA6@cet.co.jp>
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In article <31C4F08A.41C67EA6@cet.co.jp>, Michael Hancock <michaelh@cet.co.jp> says:
>
>Michael Hancock wrote:
>> 
>> Lance Cavener wrote:
>> >
>> >  Do you ever think BSD will throw a good PPP program in their next
>> > release of BSDI? I have had my eye on some commercial PPP packages for
>> > some time now, and after upgrading to BSDI, and confusing the hell out
>> > of all my users with the P it adds to the begining of the usernames, I
>> > think a commercial package with CHAP/PAP is very tempting. But before
>> > I dish out a few hundred, I just want to know if BSD is going to get
>> > to us a good PPP program?
>> 
>> Commercial PPP packages such as MorningStar still require using a scheme
>> like Pusername if your terminal server serves both shell and PPP.
>
>More background...  I think BSDI chose to use the 'Pusername' scheme for
>the same reasons 'Uusername' or 'Usitename' is often used for UUCP logins.
>It differentiates the PPP connection from the e-mail account; allows both
>type of connections to authenticate using Unix login; and using capital
>letters prevents the account from receiving mail which you usually don't
>want.
>
>> You can get around it by modifying getty to auto-detect PPP and launch a
>> PPP startup script that ensures you use CHAP or PAP authentication.
>> 
>> Someone is working on this for FreeBSD, but you should the code should
>> work on BSDI too.  Search the hackers mailing list at
>> http://www.freebsd.org  The code should be available in a couple of
>> weeks.
>> 
>> -mh

Modifying getty to autodetect PPP is a lot of work, although it would 
make any sysmgr's job easier.

In any case, we have been running BSDI 2.0 w/ patches for a couple years
now, I think, and since before that release was out, we have had our users
run a startup script for PPP as part of their login scripts.

As soon as they get a unix prompt, they type 'ppp' and hit return.  This
directly runs the /usr/bin/ppp binary.

The upside of this is that shell users do not have to have a different
account for their PPP access... the downside is that PPP users also have
access to the shell!