Re: NetworkManager PPTP Support

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 22:16 +0000, Antony J Mee wrote:
> Voyager USB ADSL modem!)  The only difficulty is that such tunnels are 
> not really "VPN" connections and NM does not presently have an 
> appropriate place for them.  Dan (without getting distracted from WPA 
> :-) ), Robert... Any thoughts on that?  Is work wired/wireless network + 
> home USB ADSL a use case too far?

Yes, we want to be able to handle DSL + PPTP, and we need to do 802.1x
auth over Ethernet too.  So we need to handle general authentication
stuff even over non-wireless networks.  We're going to spawn
wpa_supplicant to deal with that for wireless, so its not a stretch to
spawn pppd to handle that for DSL.  I expect that a more generalized
model for this will fall out somewhere along the road.  Doesn't hurt to
start thinking about it now.

Where this does get complicated is, of course, user configuration :)
We've known all along that 802.1x is going to require some heavy
configuration stuff.  What we need to do is to fit that in but still
preserve the "automatic" aspects as much as possible.  And we come back
to system-wide configuration too, where we need a framework to handle
this on sooo many levels.  Where it comes from, I don't care, as long as
we don't degrade into Shell Hell, which is where we're at now.

Dan