No problem. I think I told you the wrong chmod place. From my notes
it should be
chmod u+s /usr/sbin/kppp

Now that you can play at your leisure, you might try that and then kppp from the regular start menu.

RO

I have another question about this.....
When I add the execute command

"su - root -c kppp"

to my kppp icon properties, and log in, am I logged in as root or just executing kppp as root? And am I just as vulnerable either way? The issue came up in a discussion with a co-worker. He suggested that even if I am just executing kppp as root, the ports that kppp is opening are those accessible to only a root user, therfore essentially leaving me naked on the net to anyone able to hack into my ports.

Anyone have any thoughts?

All ports are owned by root anyway, depending on what services are started up on boot. You do become root to execute kppp (only root either by suing TO root, or root 'natural' can establish the pppd session), but the rest is still the normal user's X session. (i.e. you log in as regular user, you open a terminal and su -, you are still logged in as the regular user, and anything spawned by the user is the user. Only that specific su'ed terminal is root). Hope that makes sense.

There would have to be a buffer overflow in pppd or some such thing (beyond unlikley at this time) with a very strange TCP/IP sequence, and as soon as pppd was taken over? if it can be, your connection drops due to timeout and the 'cracker' would be hosed. I just don't think that can happen.

RO