Re: kernel RPMs

[Simon Matter <simon.matter@ch.sauter-bc.com>]

Chris Tooley schrieb:
> 
> On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 06:35, Simon Matter wrote:
> > Chris Tooley schrieb:
> > >
> > > I don't know if anyone is interested, but I found myself in a situation
> > > where I had to set up a PPTP server on a linux box (PoPToP) to
> > > authenticate Windows clients.  This meant that I had get mppe into the
> > > kernel ppp that comes built into the RedHat contributed kernel.  I ended
> > > up getting everything set up right and have RPMs built with it.  The
> > > only difference between the 2.4.9-31 kernels that are in the
> > > contributed-by-redhat directory and is the ppp difference.  This doesn't
> > > break using ppp normally it just adds the ability to use ppp-mppe.  If
> > > anyone would like a copy of these kernels they can be made available.
> > >
> > > Chris Tooley
> >
> > I might be interested one day but when this day comes, it'll be far too
> > late for the 2.4.9-31 kernel. IIRC the problem with mppe is that for
> > some reason RedHat can not include it in their kernel. It is a licence
> > thing or an export problem, isn't it?
> 
> mppe uses openssl so there may have been some export restrictions but I
> thought most of those were lifted.  Not sure though.  The mppe module
> (when modprobed) does get a warning about tainting the kernel.  Don't
> know how to go about making that social problem go away.
> 
> > I have contributed the 2.4.9-31 RPMs and the goal was to have exactly
> > the same kernel like original RedHat 2.4.9-31 but with only XFS and kdb
> > included. Could you send me the .spec and patches anyway?
> >
> I didn't do a whole lot of work to get it going.  I took the
> kernel-2.4.9-31mppe SRPM from mirrors.binarix.com/ppp-mppe, installed
> it, took the kernel-2.4.9-31SGI_XFS_1.0.2 SRPM and installed it, (noting
> that it installes on top of the mppe kernel) and added like five lines
> to the .spec to include the differences between kernel-2.4.9-31mppe.spec
> and kernel-2.4.9-31SGI_XFS_1.0.2.spec (which was not much).
> 
> The patch that is used is:
> http://mirror.binarix.com/ppp-mppe/linux-2.4.16-openssl-0.9.6b-mppe.patch.gz and the .spec file is:
> http://www.thetooleys.org/pptp/kernel-2.4.9-31-RH-xfs.spec
> Let me know if you have concerns over issues that you see with it.  The
> kernel name doesn't reflect the mppe patch at all, as changing the
> kernel name broke a bunch of my kernel modules.  This is something that
> I would expect most people will have problems with and it seems a very
> minor change in the long run, but the file names probably ought to
> reflect a difference.
> 
> Chris Tooley

My question is, why is mppe not in RedHat's kernel? Is there a license
problem?
Eric is building new kernel RPMs and I whish he could incorporate mppe.
Unfortunately I think he won't because the goal of the RH XFS kernels is
to be 100% inline with RH and just add the XFS bits. He refused to
incorporate other changes in the past and I understand why. So the best
thing will be to keep the mppe patch available and a template .spec file
so it will be easy to rebuild the upcoming RPMs with mppe support.

-Simon