Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:34:45 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: NAT and PPTP
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307171334360.4588-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
In-Reply-To: <200307171936.NAA03141@lariat.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
how is he doing pptp?


On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Brett Glass wrote:

> FreeBSD makes a very good NAT router... for most applications.
> But a client of mine is having terrible trouble with it when
> trying to use NAT with one particular protocol: PPTP.
> 
> Here's what's going on. A client has a FreeBSD box that's serving as a
> NAT router. He has one public IP, and lots of PCs behind the router on
> unregistered IPs. This works fine when they're doing browsing, etc., but
> fails horribly when users try to use PPTP to tunnel out into another LAN
> across the Internet.
> 
> The problem appears to be that PPTP -- while it uses TCP for its control
> connection -- uses GRE to encapsulate an encrypted PPP session between the
> client and the server. GRE, like TCP and UDP, is in the IP protocol family and
> uses IP addressing. However, it doesn't use "ports," as IP and UDP do;
> instead, it has a different mechanism for identifying packets that belong to
> different sessions or connections, and the header fields that must be
> inspected vary depending upon the encapsulated protocol. FreeBSD's natd
> doesn't understand that mechanism, so it doesn't know how to route GRE packets
> from the outside world back to the correct client on the private LAN.
> 
> Some NAT routers (including the DI-604 from D-Link; see
> http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=62) are able to route PPTP's GRE packets
> correctly when multiple clients on the private LAN want to tunnel out, so it's
> obviously possible. Who is the current maintainer of FreeBSD's NAT code
> (including natd and the NAT libraries)? How difficult would it be to add
> PPTP support to them?
> 
> --Brett Glass
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
> 



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.4.21.0307171334360.4588-100000>