This is the new home of l2tpd, the Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol Daemon.l2tpd was originally written by Mark Spencer, but was, apparently, abandonded in late 1998 after Mark released version 0.60. In the fall of 2000, IgLou began providing a service that required the use of the L2TP protocol and wanted to support Linux. I (Jeff McAdams) grabbed the 0.60 version of l2tpd from Mark's web site and began working with it in order to have a solution available for our (numerous) Linux users of this service. I quickly came to realize that the l2tpd code base was rather drastically out of date and barely worked with other L2TP implementations. To be fair, I don't want it to sound like I'm slamming Mark. In late 1998, when Mark abandoned the code base, L2TP was a product of the IETF PPP Extensions working group and was merely defined as an Internet Draft. As of draft 13 of the L2TP document, some fairly significant, and non-backwards-compatible changes, were made to the L2TP protocol. This occured after Mark had abandoned the l2tpd code base. In the process of working with the 0.60 version of l2tpd, I realized that it had considerable updating that would need to be done before it was really reliable and useable as a package. I began fixing the bugs that I came across as I was using it and building 0.60-jmca packages for distribution to IgLou customers that needed this software. These packages fixed the worst of the problems that we were running into, but were anything but robust. Scott Balmos, an IgLou customer that was making use of the service that required the use of L2TP, and David Stipp, a friend of Scott's, decided that they would start a project to develop and update l2tpd. Scott contacted me, knowing that I was maintaining my own tree of l2tpd updates, and I jumped on the chance to work with them as a team in maintaining l2tpd more formally. To that end, Scott and David established an l2tpd project on Sourceforge. Through the year of 2001, I did my best to publicize the l2tpd project and as more and more people became aware of it, other bugs were brought to my attention and most were fixed. Interoperability was confirmed with several of the major vendors' L2TP implementations (to a greater or lesser degree), and more progress was made in updating the l2tpd source code to adhere more closely (though still not very closely) with the L2TP RFC In early 2002, Scott came to the conclusion that he was not able to adequately contribute to the advancement of the package and offered to turn over the reigns to someone else that had more time to devote to it, and had a better understanding of the protocol. After giving it some thought and conferring with management at IgLou, I decided that I would offer to take over development and maintenance of the package from Scott. One of the major undertakings was (and continues to be as this process is ongoing) to move the project off of SourceForge's systems and to host it at IgLou. To this end, the l2tpd.org and l2tpd.com domain names were registered and a website was set up at IgLou in order to host these domains. At the time of this writing, most of the project is still hosted at Sourceforge, but as time progresses, more and more of the facilities, such as mailing lists, CVS hosting, bug trackings, etc will be set up at IgLou and development will continue to migrate. I have copious links to IgLou on these pages as they have been gracious enough to host this website at no cost, and even picked up the tab for registering the domain names! Please, visit IgLou's home page and, if you are able, support them with your business! |