On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 03:43:21 +0100, Heimo Claasen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>Ach, Bob, if it was that simple...
>
>> ... just update any workable Linux distribution on
>> that same 486 with reasonably current ppp software and you're in
>> business.
>
>In a linux workshop here we had _lots_ of problems with
>M$-tweaked ISP's ppp, and it gets worse over time. And often
>enough it's not done with a little job of "updating".
>(Someone who could tell a lot about the variations of all sorts
>of ISP login/ppp hassles is the - AFAIK only remaining - active
>_DOS_-ppp developer who still seems to follow this list.)
So far, I found only 3 PPP authentication protocols with ISPs in
Europe: PAP (= the original password authentication), CHAP (= the
RFC standard challenge handshake authentication) and MS-CHAP (= the MS
modified, but fully documented, version of CHAP).
Any current Linux PPP package should support those authentications,
and as PPP is a self-configuring protocol, the support should be
transparent to the user (= happen automatically and invisibly in the
background without requiring any special configuration).
I never looked at (and thus cannot report on) the PPP authentication
support of DOS freeware packages like KA9Q etc. But as I have
personally implemented the PPP authentication of the DOS version of
our commercial e-mail software, I can make the following statements:
(a) An implementation of PPP with PAP/CHAP and all TCP/IP levels (LCP,
IPCP, IP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, POP3, SMTP and HTTP) can be done easily
in DOS. (My implementation of all the above needs only ca. 60 KB
of RAM.)
(b) When I had to add CHAP to our e-mail software (as some ISPs of our
customers stopped supporting PAP authentication in the PPP
protocol), it took me about 7 work days to research, implement and
test the new authentication protocol. (Most of the time was spent
not for CHAP itself, but for creating a 16-bit MD5 module which I
did not yet have at that time.)
(c) So far, every ISP that I found who offered MS-CHAP, also accepted
the RFC standard CHAP. (Thus, as a lazy guy, I have studied the
specification of MS-CHAP, but found no reason to implement it yet.
If needed, it would take me ca. 2-4 days of work.)
So, while having to implement new authentication protocols may be a
certain burden for a program maintainer, it is _not_ an unsurmountable
problem and also not specific to MS-DOS. I consider it to be just one
of the facts of life that any program maintainer has to cope with.
- Wolfgang Redtenbacher
