Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.unix.amiga:10415 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:391 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yarrina.connect.com.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoknor.edu!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.amiga,comp.amiga.unix,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: Demand dialed PPP (was Re: FOLLOWUP: PPP client setup help) Date: 21 May 1995 16:17:13 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 34 Message-ID: <3pnp29$bk5@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <betts.28.00A4DF49@onramp.net> <3pni1k$bfd@su102w.ess.harris.com> <3pnija$bll@su102w.ess.harris.com> <3pnj7k$cto@news.nynexst.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu In article <3pnj7k$cto@news.nynexst.com>, H.J. Lu <hjl@nynexst.com> wrote: >You didn't mean "everything", did you? My PPP account password >changes every minute. I have to type in it by hand. How does it >handle that? [I'm not sure how my little message in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc got redisted to the entire universe like this, but I'll follow up and dive back under the covers] No offense, but having your PPP password change every minute is just silly (and I find myself wondering why you simply didn't make it "password agile" and sync off the NAVSTAR satellites, like the military crypto boys do it :-). It's not the way to solve the problem, and is somewhat overkill to boot. If you want the password to be secure at the ISP side, then you should run PAP or CHAP authentication and keep the password local to your machine. This problem has been solved, and far more nicely and transparently than changing your PPP login password every 3 seconds. ijppp (which, BTW, is in /usr/sbin/ppp and not /usr/bin/ppp on FreeBSD, as I mistakenly first stated - whoops!) deals with all that rather well, and it does all the ifconfig/routing nastiness behind the scenes so that you don't have to. It even has a built-in terminal emulator (the "term" command) that you can use to dial and dialog with your ISP, it automatically detecting the first PPP handshake and dropping back to the local side. I suppose you could simply start it manually and use this feature to enter your password each time, but that would kind of defeat the purpose. Really, use CHAP! That's what it's meant for. It also supports proxy ARP (in server mode), packet filtering and "Predictor-1 compression", all of which which are features you won't get with the standard PPP. Ok, so it doesn't make toast and water the house plants, but I'd say it does enough.. :-) Jordan