PPP+PAM Windows VPN Error 734: The PPP link control protocol was terminated

Today I was battling with "Error 734: The PPP link control protocol was terminated" that the Windows 7 VPN client was giving me. Although the fixes suggested in this forum post will probable help most people, it didn't help me (as usual).

Apparently, in my case, this was caused by having the "login" setting in your /etc/ppp/options.xl2tpd and using an improper PAM-configuration.

From what I understand is that when you enter the correct password that is in chap.secrets, it will pass that authentication step, but it could fail on PAM authentication (as was the case with my configuration). So removing the "login" option will take care of this error, but will also disable PAM-support.

Currently I'm working on how to avoid having passwords in the chap.secrets file (but only in LDAP that is accessible via PAM). Filling in "" as the secret does not seem to work... According to an Oracle (?) article CHAP cannot be used in combination with PAM, since the password isn't sent accross the link, the server cannot create the MD5 hash that is requested by the client (based on a kind of challenge). But if LDAP could generate that hash... (Yeah, I know, LDAP is a database, not an authentication server)

GCC test errors

I've compiled gcc 4.5.2 and although apparently it is impossible to have no unexpected fails when testing your compiled version (why!?), I had some extra errors when running "make -k test":

FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -O0  (test for excess errors)
FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -O1  (test for excess errors)
FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -O2  (test for excess errors)
FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer  (test for excess errors)
FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -O3 -g  (test for excess errors)
FAIL: gcc.c-torture/compile/limits-exprparen.c  -Os  (test for excess errors)

According to the compile instructions for GCC in LinuxFromScratch you have to increase your stack size to be able to successfully pass these tests:

ulimit -s 16384