This is an archive of past FreeBSD releases; it's part of the FreeBSD Documentation Archive.
Contributed by Nik Clayton
<nik@blueberry.co.uk>
28 July 1995.
User PPP was introduced to FreeBSD in release 2.0.5 as an addition to the existing kernel implementation of PPP. So, what is different about this new PPP that warrants its addition? To quote from the manual page:
This is a user process PPP software package. Normally, PPP is implemented as a part of the kernel (e.g. as managed by pppd) and it is thus somewhat hard to debug and/or modify its behavior. However, in this implementation PPP is done as a user process with the help of the tunnel device driver (tun).
In essence, this means that rather than running a PPP daemon, the ppp program can be run as and when desired. No PPP interface needs to be compiled into the kernel, as the program can use the generic tunnel device to to get data into and out of the kernel.
From here on out, user ppp will be referred to as simply as ppp unless a distinction need to be made be it and any other PPP client/server software. Unless otherwise stated, all commands in this section should be executed as root.
Parts in this section marked with an asterisk (*) are
incomplete. Comments and suggestions are appreciated and
should be submitted to Nik Clayton
<nik@blueberry.co.uk>
.
Thanks to Rob Snow <rsnow@txdirect.net> who proved to be a mine of
useful information when I was first experimenting with user ppp.