On Wed, 15 Mar 2000 hubert.kraemer@prismac.co.nz wrote:

> Don't quite understand....what does the pinhole option of PPTP provide ?
>

the PPTP pinhole allows one to proxy IP Protocol 47, this is used as the
transport for a few of the various tunneling programs/clients available,
its listed as "PPTP" because thats what the M$ PPTP (Point to point
tunneling protocol) "adaptor" that you can install on your win9x/NT system
calls itself. what I am useing it for however is for the GRE tunneling
that a cisco/other router device can use to establish a tunnel, tunnels
are usefull for connecting a remote site and makeing it seem like it is a
part of a local network (this is known as a VPN - or Virtual Private
Network)

the newer nokia firmware which is under beta at the moment allows you to
setup pinholes for aditional IP protocols (there are up to 255 reserved
numbers for the different IP protocols, you may be familiar with the
common names such as UDP, TCP and ICMP but there are others) this allows
people to do other funky stuff over their ADSL boxes such as IPsec (like
an encrypted way of creating a VPN type thingy) and other such beasties

most people will never need to know what this all means but some will
probably be useing it when they have remote offices that get connected
together across the internet.

this was a very cut down version of what all this means :) if you do a web
search for stuff like "VPN" or "IP Tunnel" or "IPsec" you will probably
find some whitepapers on the subject that give a much better description

in short, the PPTP option allws people to provide VPN type access to their
internal network :)

--
Steve.
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