ppp-on is only root executable despite permissions

[John H. Robinson, IV]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 06:52:44PM -0700, John Wenger wrote:
> Ralph Shumaker wrote:
> 
> > I've not even heard of the group "pppusers" though it sounds obvious
> > enough.
> 
> I don't know about Debian, but the group "pppusers" is part
> of Redhat 6.2.  

[jaqque at osiris:~]% ls -l /usr/sbin/pppd                  
-rwsr-x---    1 root     dip        183504 Apr  4 00:52 /usr/sbin/pppd

debian uses group dip to allow access to pppd.

[jaqque at osiris:~]% ls -l `which pon`
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           50 Apr  4 00:52 /usr/bin/pon
[jaqque at osiris:~]% cat /usr/bin/pon
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/sbin/pppd call ${1:-provider}

debian does things really simply, cleanly, and efficiently. it allows
pppd to handle all the good stuff.

[jaqque at osiris:~]% ls -ld /etc/ppp /etc/chatscripts 
drwxr-s---    2 root     dip          1024 Jul 15  1999 /etc/chatscripts
drwxr-x---    6 root     dip          1024 May 21 00:08 /etc/ppp

this prevents non trusted users from getting at username password pairs

-rw-------    1 root     dip          1508 Feb 22  1999 pap-secrets

that one only root is getting at, the one that has the passwords.

> Consider "wvdial" for your dialup solution, which is now
> part of RH6.2, and which I added to RH 5.2.  

of course, the most painless ppp setup i have seen is pppconfig; part of
Debian - i do not know if it is available for RedHat or not. try it -
you might like it.

-john