Home ›

An Introduction to FreeS/WAN, Part I

Issue 105

From Issue #105
January 2003

Jan 01, 2003  By Mick Bauer
 in
VPN tunnels for secure wireless and WAN connections, Part I of II.
Starting and Testing the Tunnel

And now the moment of truth! First on George and then on Gracie, we enter the command:

ipsec setup restart

George will read /etc/ipsec.conf, load the george-gracie tunnel definition into its connection setup database and wait for connections. Gracie will do the same thing and then bring up the tunnel. Startup messages will be logged to /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure. If on the client system the output from ipsec setup restart ends with an “IPsec SA established” message, your tunnel is up! Try pinging or otherwise connecting to hosts on the remote network; the connection should behave no differently from before when you brought the tunnel up. In fact, you may want to run tcpdump on your tunnel-bound Ethernet interface to make sure that only ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) packets (i.e., encrypted tunnel packets and not actual Ping, FTP packets, etc.) are being sent out.

Next month we'll look at another VPN scenario or two and delve deeper into the splendors of FreeS/WAN. Hopefully this was enough to get you started down the path to secure wireless networking!

Mick Bauer (mick@visi.com) is a network security consultant for Upstream Solutions, Inc., based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book Building Secure Servers with Linux, composer of the “Network Engineering Polka” and a proud parent (of children).

______________________

White Paper
More Resources
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions