[pptp-server] PPTP in Multi National Companies

[Hellings, Ross]

I work in a Multi National Company, and we have been deploying PPTP servers
using the PoPoTp Server for some time now, running on Debian 'potato'
machines for some time now, and we are very happy with its functionality.
On a daily basis we have more than 10,000 people using our 10 servers
running the PPTP Daemon.  We use a Solaris NIS+ server to deal with the
chap-secrets file, so that any user on the Solaris chap-secrets file can log
into any of our VPN servers, the reasoning being, 1. we don't want to
manually update each server to add a new user, 2. I have this horrible thing
with centralization, and I think things are much easier to manage this way.

What we do currently is, that we give each user a list of all the VPN
servers, on a country basis, and they can then manually chose, which works
fine.  But then there are all those idiots 'users' who do things like
believe in proper grammar a IP address should end with another '.' when
setting up the connection, result, it doesn't work.  What we want to do is
essentially load balancing, what I envision is, we have one main, global
PPTP server, someone tries to logon to it, the main PPTP server then re
routes it to the closest available PPTP server, with the least lag, and then
it logs on there instead, it should also be based on user load on the PPTP
server.

Another problem I have noticed is that PPTP is reasonably slow, even if we
PPTP in over the LAN in one country  , with 100MB/s network connectivity,
then it will still take much longer to transfer a big file than normal, I
found this out by trying to move a 1GB file, big mistake.  Is this due to
the fact that the PPP daemon is designed for slow communications (e.g..
Modems), or is there some way to speed this up.

What do the rest of you think about this kind of 'Load Balancing' idea, and
what is the general consensus on centralization and PPTP?

Kind Regards, and thanks for you input.

Ross Hellings
IS&T Manager,
THK