Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Link Control Options

We already encountered the Link Control Protocol (LCP), which is used to negotiate link characteristics and test the link.

The two most important options negotiated by LCP are the Asynchronous Control Character Map and the Maximum Receive Unit. There are a number of other LCP configuration options, but they are far too specialized to discuss here.

The Asynchronous Control Character Map, colloquially called the async map, is used on asynchronous links, such as telephone lines, to identify control characters that must be escaped (replaced by a specific two-character sequence) to avoid them being interpreted by equipment used to establish the link. For instance, you may want to avoid the XON and XOFF characters used for software handshake because a misconfigured modem might choke upon receipt of an XOFF. Other candidates include Ctrl-l (the telnet escape character). PPP allows you to escape any of the characters with ASCII codes 0 through 31 by specifying them in the async map.

The async map is a 32-bit-wide bitmap expressed in hexadecimal. The least significant bit corresponds to the ASCII NULL character, and the most significant bit corresponds to ASCII 31 decimal. These 32 ASCII characters are the control characters. If a bit is set in the bitmap, it signals that the corresponding character must be escaped before it is transmitted across the link.

To tell your peer that it doesn’t have to escape all control characters, but only a few of them, you can specify ...