[Vpn-help] New Releases, Development Update and Other Stuff ...

[Matthew Grooms]

All,

I just posted a 2.2.0 Alpha 3 and a 2.1.5 Beta 1 on the website. In 
response to several bug reports related to Windows standby and resume 
operations, both releases contain an updated 2K/XP that has all power 
management, NDIS request and packet reference code rewritten. I spent a 
lot of time making sure the new code was compliant and well tested. The 
other common change was adding proper handling of multiple certificate 
request payloads. This was required for interoperability with StronSWAN 
and possibly other gateways.

The 2.2.0 Alpha 3 build contains several other notable changes. The Qt 
based ikea and ikec applications have been ported to Qt version 4 and 
renamed ikea-qt and ikec-qt. A new command line version of ikec ( VPN 
Connect ) application is now included in the distribution. All library 
files are now built and installed as shared objects on Unix. An prefix 
is used to avoid any naming conflicts.

There have also been some support web site changes. The trac system was 
added some time ago but only the wiki was being actively used. The web 
based source code repository browser is now usable. I have also been 
trying to enter new problem reports in as tickets and assigning them to 
milestones instead of keeping track of them manually. *Please*, if you 
have reported a problem and don't see a ticket related to your issue, 
let me know and I will create one so the details won't get buried in the 
mailing list archive or my inbox.

http://www.shrew.net/support/report/1

A very nice Linksys wiki article has been contributed by Drew Flickema 
and we have a few more on the way. If anyone is interested in writing an 
article for a new gateway platform, please contact me.

Lastly, I just got done building a new set of VM servers for the Lab 
based on VMware ESXi. The old hardware used dual core AMD processors 
which suffer from very bad clock drift using VMWare which is reportedly 
due to unsynchronized TCSs. This made it very difficult to test the IKE 
daemon since it relies heavily on accurate timing to handle rekey and 
other event processing. The new servers are Quad Core Intel processors 
with 8 Gigs of RAM and 2TB of drive space each. It wasn't cheap but we 
shouldn't be in need of hardware to test different operating system 
variants in the future.

-Matthew