Software bugs can occur in the userland, such as in the startup scripts or the Pluto daemon, or in the kernel IPsec stack. Most software issues happen in the IKE daemon and if you can reproduce these errors, they can usually be fixed quickly. Kernel errors are more difficult to address, since finding the exact cause of a lock-up can be hard, and often the UML-based kernels do not exhibit the same problems as real kernels do.
When you hit a serious bug, Openswan's IKE daemon Pluto will terminate with either a segmentation
fault or with an assertion
failed error. When this happens, the plutorun
script will automatically restart Pluto. All connections will automatically reload or restart, which could cause the same crash, resulting in a repeating loop.
A segmentation fault always indicates a problem that needs to be addressed by the Openswan development team. The code is simply wrong and needs to be fixed.
An 'assertion failed...