Re: Up-to-date versions of CIPE/CIPEX.

["Dick St.Peters" <stpeters,AT,netheaven,DOT,com>]

Hans Steegers writes:
> I am amazed so many undertakers are still 
> lurking this list. 
> Many of them were very active in the Gutmann 
> security discussion (2003). 
> None of them contributed anything to the 
> development of CIPE.

Hmmm ... I've kept quiet this go around so far,
but I'd qualify as an "undertaker" who still lurks
here and who did contribute a little ... I wrote
and made available by ftp patches that got a few
cipe people through the kernel api changes around
kernel versions 2.6.10 to 2.6.14.  (Somebody even
downloaded my 2.6.14 patch this morning.)

I stopped developing patches because A) my last
cipe user canceled his account, and B) people like
Hans were doing a better job anyway.

I am curious, though, what the rationale is for
carrying on with cipe or cipe-derived development
or use.  As someone with a lot of experience with
both cipe and OpenVPN, the only advantage I can
think of for cipe is that it was there when we
needed it.

That was monumental at the time, and cipe deserves
a shining place of honor in the history of Linux -
and, for that matter, in the history of computing,
but the operative word is "history".

I wrote my first computer program in 1964 (!), and
in the many years since then I've had to learn to
recognize when it was time to let treasured things
go.  A few years ago I was actively promoting cipe
and selling cipe-based tunnels.  Today, I would no
more recommend using cipe than I would using
029's.

(For the youngsters out there, IBM 029's were the
typewriter-like machines that punched the holes in
IBM cards.)

Perhaps Hans can give a good reason for continuing
cipe, but so far I haven't seen one.  As an
elderly geek who has been replaced by younger
blood, I can assert there is no loss of honor in
being replaced.  Those who replaced me will
achieve more not because they are inherently
better but because they have better stuff to build
upon.  So it is with OpenVPN.  It builds upon a
base that simply wasn't there when cipe was in its
glory.  By utilizing what is available now,
OpenVPN can and does achieve things cipe cannot.

So I would say it is time to "let go" of cipe and
to remember it as it was when it was the only act
in town.  Trying to keep it going when there is no
good reason to do so risks having it remembered
not as something grand but as something that
couldn't keep up.  It deserves having its place of
honor in history preserved.

--
Dick St.Peters, stpeters,AT,NetHeaven,DOT,com 
Gatekeeper, NetHeaven, Saratoga Springs, NY