Strongswan 5 issues in IPFire 2.13

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hey,

when IPFire 2.13 was released, the latest version of strongswan was
shipped with it. Apparently, some people have problems operating their
VPN connections with it.

This is a brief summary from my point of view:

The first version with these changes that might cause trouble has been
released in August 2012 with a big headline which said: Testers needed.

 * http://planet.ipfire.org/post/testers-needed-strongswan-5-0-0
 * http://lists.ipfire.org/pipermail/development/2012-August/000039.html

My mail on the mailing list states:
> It should not require any manual interaction at all. Please install
> and give me feedback about the connection stability and the
> interoperability with other (proprietary) implementations.

It's as if someone had known...

If you think, we didn't have people who actually tested this, you are
wrong. There were a lot of people and the reports I got of them were all
like: "Yeah, this made my VPN tunnels more stable".
Especially when the configuration of one connection has been edited, the
other connections remained established all the time. A big advantage
over the implementation in IPFire 2.11!

Eight days before the final version of IPFire 2.13 was released, people
started complaining. It was not a real bug report, but just a shout out
"something went wrong, I could not be bothered, so I downgraded!". No
technical details, no logs, no what-so-ever.

Since the release, a bunch of more people complained about similar
problems. Again, no one provided (or was willing to provide) information
that helps to solve the problem. Nobody was even bothered to create a
proper bug report in bugzilla.

My VPN connections run for more than six months with strongswan 5 and I
never had any problems since then.

If someone really has interest in solving this, maybe it is time that
you start the action and help the developers. This is not a project
where you can tell people what they should do (for you). This is an Open
Source project - so everyone is able to read the source code, check what
changes have been made and to provide a fix.

-Michael