OpenL2TP Software ================= OpenL2TP is a complete implementation of RFC2661 - Layer Two Tunneling Protocol Version 2, able to operate as both a server and a client. OpenL2TP has been written specifically for Linux. It consists of - a daemon, openl2tpd, handling the L2TP control protocol exchanges for all tunnels and sessions - a plugin for pppd to allow its PPP connections to run over L2TP sessions - a Linux kernel driver for efficient datapath (packaged separately). - a command line application for management. All data packets are handled by the Linux kernel in order that the datapath be as efficient as possible. The Linux PPP-over-L2TP kernel driver (pppol2tp.o) must be loaded either dynamically as a kernel module or linked in statically. OpenL2TP was written from scratch although it borrows some concepts (in particular, the use of profiles) from an earlier L2TP project, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/l2tp. The original PPP-over-L2TP kernel driver was written by Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>. Until now it has never been integrated into an L2TP implementation. Katalix Systems Ltd have made significant feature enhancements and are actively working on this driver, seeking to have it incorporated in the Linux kernel source tree. OpenL2TP is dual licensed. See LICENSE file for details. The Linux kernel driver is distributed under the same license terms as the Linux kernel itself, Copyright Martijn van Oosterhout. To get started, go to the openl2tp(7) man page. For the impatient, a Quick Start guide is available online at http://opensource.katalix.com/openl2tp/quick_start.html. If you have a host configuration where prebuilt binary packages are not available, please consider building one and contributing your work. For RedHat Fedora, see instructions in the redhat subdirectory. License ======= See the LICENSE file in this directory. Related Work ============ - http://www.l2tpd.org/downloads/ Derived from early work by Mark Spencer (1998), this version has had several maintainers/developers. - http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tp/ Now defunct (?), this Linux implementation by B. Baumann promised much but never really caught on, was buggy and was difficult to set up. No new versions since 2002. - http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ This was written from scratch by Roaring Penguin Software. No kernel datapath support. rp-l2tp is packaged with some Linux distributions and tends to be used in smaller setups, most often as an L2TP client for the desktop. - http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpns/ This is a userspace L2TP/PPP daemon for serving thousands of L2TP/PPP sessions. Its L2TP protocol implementation is not as complete as OpenL2TP's and its datapath is in userspace. - http://www.xelerance.com/software/xl2tpd/ This is a fork of the original l2tpd.org l2tp project. Why a new implementation then? Linux is being widely deployed in commercial networking products and in servers in corporate offices. These environments demand an L2TP server implementation that will scale to support many simultaneous users, each with potentially different configuration. We also wanted an infrastructure that would be able to support PPP Proxy in the future for use in B-RAS environments. The existing L2TP implementations weren't designed for these environments. Note that OpenL2TP may be used as an L2TP client, possibly replacing rp-l2tp in some setups. OpenL2TP may suit environments where more flexible configuration is needed. About Katalix Systems Ltd ========================= Katalix Systems Ltd is a privately held company based Reading, UK specializing in custom Embedded Linux work. Please visit us at http://www.katalix.com Suggestions for feature enhancements are always welcome. Send them to openl2tp-users@lists.sourceforge.net which is an open mailing list for OpenL2TP users. Subscription to the list is required in order to send unmoderated posts.