gentoo - notes

Spent several hours of frustration, attempting to get pptpclient to a vpn provided by a watchguard firebox. The connection would be established, but I was unable to ping any hosts on the network, so I wasted time playing with routing commands to no effect. Finally stumbled across this line in the log (note it appears only after the connection is established):
Unsupported protocol 0x2145 received
A quick search, to find answer faq, add the line:
"nopcomp"
to the /etc/ppp/options.pptp file and it all started working :-).

Upgrading to 2.6.4
After a bit of stress with gentoo-dev-sources, I followed these steps:

1. download the MPPE/MPPC kernel module for Linux
2. create a symbolic link: ln -s linux-2.6.4-gentoo-r1/ linux-2.6.4
3. patch the kernel: zcat /home/software/linux/linux-2.6.4-mppe-mppc-0.99.patch.gz | patch -p0 -E
4. compile the kernel: make && make modules_install
5. add alias ppp-compress-18 ppp_mppe_mppc to /etc/modules.d/ppp
6. run modules-update
7. run modprobe pp-compress-18 to check it was okay
8. create a symbolic link: ln -s ppp-2.4.2 ppp-2.4.2.orig
9. patch the ppp source (v2.4.2): zcat /home/software/linux/ppp-2.4.2-stdopt-mppe-mppc-0.82.patch.gz | patch -p0 -E
10. install ppp: ./configure && make && make install

Unfortunately, I'm still failing to establish a connection. Hopefully someone will answer my request for help on the gentoo forums.

Upgrading to 2.6.5
After a bit of stress with mm-dev-sources, I followed these steps from the pptpclient gentoo howto

1. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -a ppp
2. USE="crypt" emerge -a pptpclient
3. modprobe ppp-compress-18 reported FATAL: Module ppp_mppe not found.
4. Followed debian mppe kernel patch howto
5. Recompiled the kernel (added "PPP MPPE compression" as a module)