I've recently struggled with setting up Poptop to establish encrypted mschap and/or mschap-v2 vpn connections with Windows XP. I did the whole mppe patch to my kernel and everything to allow for the encryption on the linux box. If anyone can suggest why WinXP keeps giving my the 'Error: 800 VPN connection cannot be established' when I try to connect with encryption, let me know please. There are no network problems here, I am able to connect successfully without encryption.

So back to the point of this thread, I was wondering if encryption is really necessary in this case. I plan on just using this vpn server box to access my home network from school. There isn't any "ultra sensitive corporate data" on my home network, so therefore I don't really see the point of encryption in the first place. I've already spent a lot of time patching my kernel and it's become frustrating enough to the point where I'm loosing motivation to make encryption work if it really isn't needed. Am I just asking for trouble without encryption on such a simple vpn implementation? I don't really know where to go from here.

-Rims

Like Shakespear once said: To be or not to be that is the question.

I quess, from what you posted,
"I was wondering if encryption is really necessary in this case. I plan on just using this vpn server box to access my home network from school. There isn't any "ultra sensitive corporate data" on my home network, so therefore I don't really see the point of encryption in the first place. I've already spent a lot of time patching my kernel and it's become frustrating enough to"

you decide if encryption is neccessary.

if you understand the concept of encryption, then youd know why youd use it.

Whether or not you want to use encryption is totally up to you. What are you doing between the 2 computers? Is it something others shouldn't see? Are plain text passwords floating in plain text that people could see (like ftp, pop, imap, telnet, etc,etc)? Like the guy above said, It's your decision.

You can use some secure protocols for what you are doing. That would help. Use ssh over telnet and stuff like that. Or you could keep at it. Everytime I have trouble like that it is just a mundane detail or typo or transposed field or something stupid like that.

Yeah, well I pretty much just want to use the home gateway instead of the school gateway. This will allow me to run servers and avoid any filtering and or bandwidth discrimination. That was really the whole point of me doing this.
As for ssh, I was going to use it at first, but then realized that the tunneling implementation it uses is very limited in terms of having to emulate a proxy server. I did not want to have to depend on proxy settings for all my outgoing net apps. I am a lot happier with the result of full network traffic forwarding regardless of whether or not a given program supports proxy configurations.
Therefore, I guess I am able to answer my own freakin' question because the "data" that will be passing through this vpn connection will be the same "data" that I've always been spewing out through my school network anyways. Hah, so there ya go, I'm content without encryption.

-Rims

I actually got the MS Chaps v2 with 128 encryption to finally work! Yay, the stupid options.pptpd file needs "mschap" instead of "chapms", as referenced incorrectly on the Poptop documentation! Go Figure! Anyways, i'm really happy because it took me a very long time to patch my kernel since I originally had the minimal box install from red hat installer without any source/devel rpms.
I'd like to ask if enabling compression would be a good idea and how to do it if anyone knows. (Poptop's documentation is a little incomplete) Does it affect transfer speed that much? I also am running all this on a good ol' 100 Mhz p-1 system, so I don't want to enable compression if it will eat away at my processor resources. Let me know what's up.

-Rims