Brainstorm

Add PPTP (VPN) support for Connnection Manager

Posted on 2010-01-19 00:31 UTC by Luis Soeiro. Status: Under consideration, Categories: Internet & Networking.

N900 - Maemo 5 (and others)

PPTP is a VPN protocol that is found everywhere, mainly because it is easy to setup in the Windows world. It may not be the best VPN out there, but there are lots of people would would benefit from being able to easily connect to their coporate network.

PPTP (and maybe others, like OpenVPN) should somehow be added to the Connection Manager. There should be possible for the user to associate a connection (GPRS, Wifi, etc) with PPTP so that it can be used in an easy manner.

Desktop Linux has it, Windows mobile has it, iPhone has it and Windows client also has it. It is about time N900 can have it, too.

Thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=481092#post481092

Solutions for this brainstorm

Solution #1: Add another TAB for connection settings

Posted on 2010-01-19 00:31 UTC by Luis Soeiro.

It should not be hard to make a deb with the necessary modules and daemons for PPP and add it as a dependency for a improved Connection Manager. This improved Connection Manager would have a new settings tab that could accept other VPN configurations, such as PPTP, OpenVPN, etc.

Solution #2: First PPTP kernel support

Posted on 2010-01-31 03:33 UTC by Kasper Larsen.

First we need PPTP support compiled into kernel for PR1.2...

Solution #3: Enforce PPTP usage

Posted on 2010-02-09 03:34 UTC by Stefan Möhl.

One use-case for a VPN is when I visit other companies and don't want them to have a full log of where I surf while using their WLAN. Once I have an open VPN connection to my own office I can surf to companies that compete with the one I am visiting without them knowing. Unfortunately, on Windows, if the VPN goes down you can still go on surfing, even if your "armour" is lost.

Though your home-office network becomes unavailable (yes, I know, the primary use-case for a VPN), the secondary use-case: Anonymizing and hiding your network activities, is (sometimes silently) lost.

By adding the VPN as a new network connection and forbidding automatic connection to other networks, this situation could be avoided. Could we do this for the N900? If anyone knows how to solve my problem in Windows, I am interested too :-)

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