No SWAN for me
Sunday, May 21st, 2006The CVS Cop-out inspired this post regarding some of the possible problems with Open Source. The focus of that article was regarding regarding the classic problem of installing some new software only to find a bug in the portion you needed most. Then when you go looking for support you find that yes they bug has been fixed, but it is in CVS and not released to the main distribution. This of course presents problems for most every day users that don’t know how to get the cvs manually and build the program.
But of course I have gotten way off of my intended subject. A problem I ran into this last week that has driven me absolutely batty, I attempted to insall and use Openswan. Openswan is a kernel based Ipsec software, to create essentially very secure tunnels between seperate networks or between a user and network. From all of my research it looked as if Openswan was the best and most reliable choice to use. I couldn’t have been more wrong!! For 4 days of HELL I attempted and attempted to get it too work. I check the mailing lists, the user groups and IRC. Usually the answer I got was RTFM, which I wouldn’t mind so much if I hadn’t read the manual checked the user groups before I tried to ask questions. But I tried unsuccessfully for a few days before I tried to ask questions.
It’s not like I was just trying to suck as much information out of someone, in fact after not being able to get anyone else’s help I was in IRC hoping for someone more helpful to show up. And surprise surprise all of my reading helped me to solve their problem when I couldn’t solve my own. Maybe the user community will be more helpful in the future, but at least I won’t have to worry about it.
