Mac OS version 9 suffers from the same issues as Windows 9x: both simply predate large-scale deployment of IPsec. We will not discuss Mac OS 9 in this book. Mac OS X has seen three major releases so far, code named Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, or version numbers 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.
From a technical point of view, these Mac OS X versions have the same capabilities, since they all use KAME's Racoon under the hood. However, the Tiger GUI offers functionality not found in the earlier versions, for instance allowing user-friendly configuration of support for X.509 Certificates, VPN dial on demand, and whether to send the default route through the VPN or not. The GUI is geared towards L2TP, but if you manually configure Racoon with your own configuration files, you can also create IPsec tunnels without L2TP. Some third-party software, such as Securitas, is indeed just a GUI for creating Racoon configuration files avoiding Apple's VPN system altogether. Cisco ships its own IPsec client...