someone can port user space ppp now

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Hi,

I have finished my work on the tunnel interface so far[1] that I think someone
can have a go at porting user space ppp. Don't count on me[2], I took a look at
it, and it's quite ugly, because ppp does a lot of things we don't support,
so you have to butcher to code a bit. See below for some tips.

Here is what you need:
Current CVS Hurd, at least the pfinet directory.
The patch from
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/files/pfinet-tun-20001005.diff.gz

There are two options:

a. Porting netgraph and mpd, which uses netgraph.

b. Porting ppp.

You get ppp and mpd from ftp.whistle.com (/pub/archie/mpd etc)
I don't know where netgraph is.
I don't know which of those options will lead faster to a success.

Some initial porting tips: Define
-D_BSD_SOURCE -DMAXHOSTNAMELEN=64 -DMAXPATHLEN=4096

In ppp, main(), remove the code that tries to close all file descriptors
(our current libc binary still doesn't have Rolands patch to limit the
announced number of available fds).

Use fsysopts to change the routing information and interface address.
We currently don't support shutting down the interface, I think, but I think
one can bring it up by starting with a pfinet that doesn't have one and
adding it with fsysopts. You probably want to remove all fancy code in ppp
that takes care of that, and only provide a small subset of all features.

I hope now that the hurd core stuff is done, some of the people who took
interest in ppp by contributing to the design discussions (which have lead
to the implementation of the tunnel device) are now making a serious (maybe
collaborative) attempt to port the ppp stuff.

Specific questions about the porting should be asked on bug-hurd@gnu.org, not
debian-hurd.

Thanks,
Marcus

[1] There will be various updates to properly shut down the interface, etc,
    but the basic functionality is there.
[2] I simply don't want to.

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