PPTP is known to be less secure than other VPN software, but if you need a quick solution for a VPN server that will connect out of the box from Windows workstations PPTP is the obvious choice. This post will show how easy it is to setup a pptp vnp server on Debian Etch.

A while ago setting up a pptp server was not so simple. It involved patching the kernel and the ppp daemon. These days in Debian Etch everything comes out of the box and we just have to install the pptpd server and configure it based on our needs. First let’s install pptpd:
aptitude install pptpd
(this will install also some dependencies: bcrelay and ppp). The default pptpd configuration file is installed under /etc/pptpd.conf ; you can change any of the available options (samples are included in the configuration file as comments), but really the only thing that needs to be configured is the ip of the local server used by pptpd as the local gateway for the remote hosts and the remote users assigned ips: Read the rest of this entry »