A PPPoE Implementation for Linux

Many DSL service providers use PPPoE for residential broadband Internet access. This paper briefly describes the PPPoE protocol, presents strategies for implementing it under Linux and describes in detail a user-space implementation of a PPPoE client.

Many Internet service providers are using the Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) to provide residential Digital Subscriber Link (DSL) broadband Internet access. Most ISP's do not support Linux and supply PPPoE clients only for Windows and Mac OS. This paper describes a PPPoE client for Linux. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides an introduction to the PPPoE protocol and a brief discussion of why it is used. Section 3 describes the various strategies which can be used to implement PPPoE under Linux. Section 4 describes rp-pppoe, a particular user-space implementation of PPPoE. Section 5 describes additional PPPoE-related tools and ports to non-Linux systems. Finally, Section 6 contains some concluding remarks.