Hello,
as Core Update 61 has now been released, it is time to go on with developments for the next one:
I have updated strongswan to version 5.0.0 which finally removes the pluto daemon which was responsible for IKEv1 connections. However, pluto has gotten very old and was created in the beginnings of the IPsec for Linux developments back in freeswan times.
charon was introduced by strongswan some time ago when IKEv2 connections got supported. It handles IKEv1 connections as well as IKEv2 connections since strongswan version 5.0.0.
What are the benefits for IPFire?
As mentioned earlier, pluto is very old and got very hard to maintain. There have been problems with VPNs that terminate at hosts with dynamic IP addresses, so we needed to restart the entire IPsec subsystem in intervals of 5 minutes. This caused some trouble in stability terms.
charon handles those dynamic endpoints much better without the need to restart anything. Connections may now be added and removed smoothly and in total there should be much more connection stability.
There is also some new code for hybrid IPsec VPNs which can be used with Android 4 and maybe Apple iOS. I have not done any investigation on this topic, because I am not interested, but hopefully somebody else gives it a shot.
I have now packaged the changes into a small package which wants to be installed on your system.
http://people.ipfire.org/~ms/unsupported/core-upgrade-2.11-strongswan.ipfire
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.
I am looking forward to it.
Michael
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