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LinDANA

Introduction

When I got my first ADSL-connection a couple of years back (yes, it's been that long), the telco only supported Microsoft Windows as client platform. The reason was that you had the use a non-standard system to establish the connection. You first had to acquire a temporary IP address using DHCP. Following that, you had to provide authentication information to a central server using a proprietary protocol. After successful authentication, you had to release your temporary IP address, and reacquire a “public” address, again using DHCP.

The problem was the authentication step: the telco only provided a client program for this protocol (which was the so-called “DANA” protocol by Alcatel) for the Microsoft Windows platform. I found this to be rather annoying, since I was using Linux/OpenBSD as my platform of choice, and not Windows. So, following the traditional do-it-yourself philosophy of these operating systems, I went and did it myself. That is, I wrote my own client software based upon an existing prototype of a Linux client program, and further reverse-engineering of the protocol by myself (tcpdump is your friend). If you're interested in further details of the protocol, I refer you to my DANA page.

You can find the available source packages for the resulting client program (which I called “LinDANA”, not having much inspiration at the time) below.

Since some time, my ADSL provider uses PPP-over-ethernet (PPPoE) as connection protocol. Since this is a more standard way of connection (than the DANA protocol), and since they appear to have completely dropped support for the DANA protocol, I have discontinued further development of LinDANA. Thanks to everybody who provided support and feedback, it was a fun ride, and it served its purpose for the time it lasted. PPPoE support is nowadays readily available (either built-in or by third-party packages) for almost all operating systems.

Available LinDANA distributions