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

Known Outstanding Bugs


There are currently a few unresolved bugs that might affect your Openswan installation. You should make sure that the latest release of Openswan has not fixed these issues and also check any open issues listed at http://bugs.openswan.org/.

  • Some people encounter very short UDP fragments on TCP or SYN packets after updating their Openswan from 2.3.x to 2.4.x. This was due to a bug in KLIPS in versions 2.4.0 to 2.4.4. Please upgrade or specify fragicmp=no as workaround.

  • It seems that SMP machines might still experience crashes when KLIPS is used. There is a fix in Openswan 2.4.4 which might have resolved this issue.

  • There are still some Mac OS X interoperability problems with NAT-T because Apple did not correctly implement the NAT-T specifications. Currently, the initial connection will work fine, but at rekey time, the connection will fail.

  • Multiple roadwarriors behind the same NAT router cannot establish transport mode (L2TP) connections to the same Openswan server. A patch is currently being worked on to resolve this.

  • There have been reports that using an AMD64 (x86_64) kernel with a 32-bit Openswan userland fails with NETKEY errors.

  • Some minor NAT-T issues were reported where Openswan would use the wrong source port or incorrectly detect double NAT.

  • type=transport and rightsubnet=vhost:%priv should work together but give a bogus error. (Workaround: remove type=transport and it will still use transport mode.)