FreeSWan vs. Openswan

[Paul O'Malley]

volvoguy wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I just got the good news that my web design and general computer
>techie business partner wants to use Ubuntu for our next customer
>install. (He's been a dedicated Slacker since it's inception I
>think!). Unfortunately I'm the web design guy and he's the techie, so
>I didn't have any immediate answers to a few of his questions. The
>four "must have's" that he said we need are:
>
>DHCP Server (easy)
>DNS Server (easy)
>IPChains (no clue how this works in Ubuntu. there's no "IPChains" package)
>FreeSWan (again, no clue about this in Ubuntu. Synaptic has a
>metapackage by that name that installs "Openswan" in place of
>FreeSWan. does Openswan behave enough like FreeSWan that it will work
>with other machines running FreeSWan?).
>
>  
>
Taken from the FreeSWan site.


        2004/03/01

   FreeS/WAN is no longer in active development.


If you need a VPN then I suggest OpenVPN, simple, easy, almost does the 
whole job itself. Several good FAQs.

I have a rather simple opinion IPSec is not the way to implement IT 
Security.  However that should really be the subject of a diseratation. 
When it comes to cross platform Linux /FreeBSD /Something else I have 
set up VPNs across all of these. The only thing to make sure of is that 
you run the same version on all platforms.

Problems with OpenVPN are usually down to people breaking standard 
network situations. [For instance one group of clever people that I came 
across had set all their network machines to have the gateway to be the 
same as the machines own IP. ]

Network debugging tools soon show where problems lie.

Regards,

Paul O'Malley