PPP

Resources

Wikipedia

PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) is commonly used in establishing a direct connection between two networking nodes. It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption, and compression.

Installation

USE flags for net-dialup/ppp Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)

activefilter	Enables active filter support
atm	Enable Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol support
dhcp	Installs PPP DHCP client plugin for IP address allocation by a DHCP server (see http://www.netservers.co.uk/gpl/)
eap-tls	Enables support for Extensible Authentication Protocol and Transport Level Security (see http://www.nikhef.nl/~janjust/ppp/index.html)
gtk	Installs GTK+ password prompting program that can be used by passprompt.so PPP plugin for reading the password from a X11 input terminal
ipv6	Add support for IP version 6
pam	Add support for PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) - DANGEROUS to arbitrarily flip
radius	Enables RADIUS support
selinux	!!internal use only!! Security Enhanced Linux support, this must be set by the selinux profile or breakage will occur
systemd	Enable use of systemd-specific libraries and features like socket activation or session tracking

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2024-04-13 06:25 More information about USE flags

Portage has a USE flag ppp for enabling support for PPP for other packages.

Note
Enabling ppp USE flag will pull in net-dialup/ppp automatically

FILE /etc/portage/make.conf

USE="... ppp ..."

After setting global USE flags update your system to the changes take effect:

root #emerge --ask --changed-use --deep @world

Or emerge net-dialup/ppp package manually:

root #emerge --ask net-dialup/ppp

Kernel

Following kernel options need to be enabled, to support PPPoE, which is used in most cases.

Note
Using PPP compression is not suggested.

KERNEL

Device Drivers  --->
    [*] Network device support  --->
      <*>   PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
      < >     PPP BSD-Compress compression (NEW)
      < >     PPP Deflate compression (NEW)
      [ ]     PPP filtering (NEW)
      < >     PPP MPPE compression (encryption) (EXPERIMENTAL) (NEW)
      [ ]     PPP multilink support (EXPERIMENTAL) (NEW)
      <*>     PPP over Ethernet (EXPERIMENTAL)
      < >     PPP support for async serial ports (NEW)
      < >     PPP support for sync tty ports (NEW)

Optional PPP options

Option	Driver	Description
PPP BSD-Compress compression	ppp_bsdcomp	(Not recommended) Support for data compression. "PPP Deflate compression" is preferable.
PPP filtering	-	Support for packet filtering.
PPP MPPE compression (encryption)	ppp_mppe	Driver for Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption.
PPP multilink support	-	Support for PPP multilink to combine serveral lines.
PPP over Ethernet	pppoe	Driver for PPPoE.
PPP support for sync tty ports	ppp_sync_tty	Support for synchronous devices.

Finally you need to rebuild linux, install and boot new kernel with PPP support.

Configuration

Provided eth0 following lines should be added for PPPoE connection:

FILE /etc/conf.d/netAdd:

...
config_ppp0="ppp"
link_ppp0="eth0" (Specify your ethernet interface)
plugins_ppp0="pppoe"
username_ppp0='user'
password_ppp0='password'
pppd_ppp0="
noauth
defaultroute
usepeerdns
mtu 9120 (Get the correct MTU (Jumbo frame) value from your eth0 Gigabit Ethernet card interface)
holdoff 3
child-timeout 60
lcp-echo-interval 15
lcp-echo-failure 3
noaccomp noccp nobsdcomp nodeflate nopcomp novj novjccomp"
...
rc_net_ppp0_need="net.eth0"

Create an init script for the PPP device by symlinking to net.lo:

root #ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.ppp0

root #/etc/init.d/net.ppp0 start

See also

• Gentoo handbook PPPoE configuration