OpenL2TP Software
=================

OpenL2TP is a complete implementation of RFC2661 - Layer Two Tunneling
Protocol Version 2, able to operate as both a server and a client.

OpenL2TP has been written specifically for Linux. It consists of

- a daemon, openl2tpd, handling the L2TP control protocol exchanges
  for all tunnels and sessions

- a plugin for pppd to allow its PPP connections to run over L2TP
  sessions

- a Linux kernel driver for efficient datapath (packaged separately).

- a command line application for management.

All data packets are handled by the Linux kernel in order that the
datapath be as efficient as possible. The Linux PPP-over-L2TP kernel
driver (pppol2tp.o) must be loaded either dynamically as a kernel
module or linked in statically.

OpenL2TP was written from scratch although it borrows some concepts
(in particular, the use of profiles) from an earlier L2TP project,
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/l2tp.

The original PPP-over-L2TP kernel driver was written by Martijn van
Oosterhout <[email protected]>. Until now it has never been integrated
into an L2TP implementation. Katalix Systems Ltd have made significant
feature enhancements and are actively working on this driver, seeking
to have it incorporated in the Linux kernel source tree.

OpenL2TP is dual licensed. See LICENSE file for details. The Linux
kernel driver is distributed under the same license terms as the Linux
kernel itself, Copyright Martijn van Oosterhout.

To get started, go to the openl2tp(7) man page. For the impatient, a
Quick Start guide is available online at
http://opensource.katalix.com/openl2tp/quick_start.html.

If you have a host configuration where prebuilt binary packages are
not available, please consider building one and contributing your
work. For RedHat Fedora, see instructions in the redhat subdirectory.

License
=======

See the LICENSE file in this directory. 

Related Work
============

- http://www.l2tpd.org/downloads/

  Derived from early work by Mark Spencer (1998), this version has had
  several maintainers/developers.

- http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tp/

  Now defunct (?), this Linux implementation by B. Baumann promised
  much but never really caught on, was buggy and was difficult to set
  up. No new versions since 2002.

- http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/

  This was written from scratch by Roaring Penguin Software. No kernel
  datapath support. rp-l2tp is packaged with some Linux distributions
  and tends to be used in smaller setups, most often as an L2TP client
  for the desktop.

- http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpns/

  This is a userspace L2TP/PPP daemon for serving thousands of
  L2TP/PPP sessions. Its L2TP protocol implementation is not as
  complete as OpenL2TP's and its datapath is in userspace.

- http://www.xelerance.com/software/xl2tpd/

  This is a fork of the original l2tpd.org l2tp project.


Why a new implementation then? 

Linux is being widely deployed in commercial networking products and
in servers in corporate offices. These environments demand an L2TP
server implementation that will scale to support many simultaneous
users, each with potentially different configuration. We also wanted
an infrastructure that would be able to support PPP Proxy in the
future for use in B-RAS environments. The existing L2TP
implementations weren't designed for these environments.

Note that OpenL2TP may be used as an L2TP client, possibly replacing
rp-l2tp in some setups. OpenL2TP may suit environments where more
flexible configuration is needed.

About Katalix Systems Ltd
=========================

Katalix Systems Ltd is a privately held company based Reading, UK
specializing in custom Embedded Linux work.

Please visit us at http://www.katalix.com

Suggestions for feature enhancements are always welcome. Send them to
[email protected] which is an open mailing list for
OpenL2TP users. Subscription to the list is required in order to send
unmoderated posts.