Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By : Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters
Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By: Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters

Overview of this book

<p>With the widespread use of wireless and the integration of VPN capabilities in most modern laptops, PDA's and mobile phones, there is a growing desire for encrypting more and more communications to prevent eavesdropping. Can you trust the coffee shop's wireless network? Is your neighbor watching your wireless? Or are your competitors perhaps engaged in industrial espionage? Do you need to send information back to your office while on the road or on board a ship? Or do you just want to securely access your MP3's at home? IPsec is the industry standard for encrypted communication, and Openswan is the de-facto implementation of IPsec for Linux.</p> <p>Whether you are just connecting your home DSL connection with your laptop when you're on the road to access your files at home, or you are building an industry size, military strength VPN infrastructure for a medium to very large organization, this book will assist you in setting up Openswan to suit those needs.</p> <p>The topics discussed range from designing, to building, to configuring Openswan as the VPN gateway to deploy IPsec using Openswan. It not only for Linux clients, but also the more commonly used Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows and MacOSX. Furthermore it discusses common interoperability examples for third party vendors, such as Cisco, Checkpoint, Netscreen and other common IPsec vendors.</p> <p>The authors bring you first hand information, as they are the official developers of the Openswan code. They have included the latest developments and upcoming issues. With experience in answering questions on a daily basis on the mailing lists since the creation of Openswan, the authors are by far the most experienced in a wide range of successful and not so successful uses of Openswan by people worldwide.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks with Openswan
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

Configuration Problems


Most of the time, when Openswan fails to correctly set up a tunnel, you will see IKE errors in the system logs, and a configuration error is at fault.

A configuration error in this context does not necessarily mean an error in the Openswan configuration files, it could simply be that the two IPsec endpoints do not agree. If the connection has Openswan at both ends, this can be fairly easily verified, since most if not all parameters will be the same on each side. If you control both ends, which is often the case for Openswan-to-Openswan connections, then configuration errors are fairly easily spotted and corrected by reading and comparing the log entries on both ends.

Note

Do not enable debugging in ipsec.conf to debug configuration issues.

Connection Names

When the first packet of an IKE exchange is received, it is not always clear which connection definition applies to it. Pluto will pick a connection name that could match. Once it knows more about the connection being...