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OpenVPN 2.3 does support IPv6 in tun mode, even point-to-multipoint. It still needs an IPv4 pool though but you can just ignore it and go IPv6 only.

http://www.greenie.net/ipv6/openvpn.html

and if so inclined, a powerful, albeit far more involved to set up, linux option is to use vgetty:

http://alpha.greenie.net/vgetty/

One of these days, in my copious spare time...

Junk faxing actually predates email spam, and we got laws prohibiting it quite a while ago.

...and a fat lot of good they did, too. I ended up setting up an old computer at work with a modem and mgetty to receive faxes, so that the numerous junk faxes at least wouldn't waste paper & ink.

Vgetty From the web page: Vgetty turns your voice modem into an answering machine. It adds voice capabilities to mgetty. This means, that you can handle data, fax and voice calls on one telephone line. How good all this works depends strongly on the modem you have. There are many modems with bad voice implementations and quite a few more expensive ones with a good hardware and firmware.

I would like an adaptor that allows me to connect an ordinary phone to my network. This adaptor would give the phone an IP address, and you could send commands from Linux to make the phone ring, and if it's off-hook to send and receive digital audio, decode touch-tones, etc.

This is mostly doable...and your OS of choice is (for the most part) irrelevant -- be it Linux, *BSD, Windows, or QNX. With a service like Vonage, you get a Cisco ATA, which you plug your ordinary phone into. It differs slightly from your ideal situation, since it does not give your phone an individual IP address (and a POTS phone will not respond to an IP address anyway)...but judging from the documentation I was able to dig up, it's all very hackable. I'm sure that you can make your phone ring using a PC (and some know-how). Further, I'm sure that you can intercept, decode, and possibly insert whatever you need (be it DTMF or otherwise). It just takes time and effort. If you're using a service like Vonage, intercepting the transmission is simple, and can be done using a packet sniffer, or simply using a modem as an intermediary between your ATA and analog phone (all on the analog side, not the Ethernet side). I believe that vgetty has the ability to easily interpret the DTMF (for dialtones, dialed digits, ringtones, etc). Inserting signal into the line can also be accomplished fairly easily (with time and effort).

Then I would like another adaptor that allows me to connect the phone line to my network.

This is doable as well. Use another analog modem for this. Again, check out vgetty for voicemail and other related services.

It would also put a lot of companies, which sell multi-thousand dollar devices to do the same kinds of things, devices which are thoroughly proprietary and considerably less programmable... out of business.

The government, also, will never allow it. If they want to wiretap there is no longer an easy way to do it.

I doubt that the big players in the industry are sweating this. Not many companies (who buy these multi-thousand dollar devices) care that much about programability beyond what's already available. They would rather spend more money on a phone system that just works than a really cheap one that requires a full-time employee dedicated to configuring and maintaining that system. It ends up costing more in the end. Your proxy idea, where you have an analog line conntected to an IP network and saving long distance dollars -- VoIP companies do this now. I think it's easier to spend $25 a month on it than roll my own.

As far as the government -- what country are you from, anyway? I'm in the US and use VoIP regularly, which is currently not as easy as POTS to wiretap. I'm positive that, as it becomes more widespread, my government will find a way to tap those lines even easier than POTS phones. Also, remember that most home user's VoIP calls terminate to a POTS line, making at least one end tapable. Finally, the US government typically does not put limitations on encryption for use inside of the country. There is no reason why they would ever ban it. ...This is all presuming that you're in the US though.

That being said, it would make a cool project anyway. When do you get started?

--Turkey

That sounds awesome, do you have a page detailing the software that you use for that?

It's cobbled together from shell scripts on top of vgetty.

I have a USRobotics Sportster Voice 33.6 modem which was a giveaway because nobody wants 33.6 modems anymore, but they work great for voice. I'm sure you can find them at those suburban computer flea market show things.

The two phone lines (one real and one from the Vonage box) are bridged using a little relay and some resistors from Radio Shack and this X-10 box, in conjunction with the Firecracker set they gave away for $5 a couple years ago (and which I learned about from Slashdot).

The whole thing is an unsightly mess, both physically and software-wise, but it hangs together. I haven't made any changes in a while and I'm a little afraid to mess with it, though... The vgetty stuff was tricky to get right.

An old PC with voice modem and vgetty would do the trick. vgetty can turn any PC with a voice modem into an answering machine. vgettty would record the message. Then some script could go through the call list of numbers you have, and play the message to them.

Here is the main site for vgetty.

There's a package called vgetty that will let you do exactly what you're after.

Assuming you have a caller-ID-capable voice modem and a beat-up old unixish computer lying around, you can do pretty much anything you can think up.

The key to most of the call filtering stuff is to turn off the ringers on your phones and instead hook a speaker to the box you have running vgetty. Someone calls in, your box answers it, and if it likes the caller it plays ringback into the modem and generates an audible signal through the external speaker (this signal, of course, can vary based on caller ID or on a PIN the caller entered). If it doesn't like them, it can tell them why or just hang up.

Coupled with caller ID, you can do things like having different messages for different callers (for instance, people you know can always get a recording with your pager and cellphone numbers, while strangers just get the standard). You can have it never wake you up prior to 10am, unless someone touch-tones in a special code you've given them. If you have two phone lines and a little extra hardware, you can do discretionary follow-me forwarding so certain people can always find you. If you live in an area where pay phones accept incoming calls, you can use your two phone lines to make unlimited-length, unlimited-number calls for a quarter (plus your home landline call cost, which shouldn't be much) from any pay phone. You can make the phone of your choice into your personal private office. The sky's the limit.

My next project is to make it so I can call in to my 800 number and have it read my email to me using Festival.

After that, I've got to do something about my apartment building entry system - the landlord charges $50 for extra Mul-T-Lock keys (anyone know where I can get them copied on the sly?), so when I have visitors stay over, we have to play the key trading game. I'd like to be able to give my computer a heads up with my cell phone, and then if I call it from the box downstairs within the next couple minutes, it will just send the tone to pop open the door for me.

mgetty + voice has the low level capability you need as well as a perl interface. You will end up doing a lot of the work to do this yourself. But the pieces are there.

Find mgetty here.