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Comment by NetStrikeForce | Hacker News Reader

SoftEther, a multi platform and open-source software supports ICMP and DNS tunnelling among other things (SSL, OpenVPN, IPsec, etc)

http://www.softether.org

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SoftEther is an amazing piece of software. As mentioned I was a little dubious of it back when it was closed source and touted so many features. After going open source I trialled it on a small network (~40 users) and it was rock solid.

My only gripe was user management. It lacks an LDAP or PAM integration, substituting RADIUS instead. No biggy, I can set up a SoftEther->RADIUS->LDAP bridge. The caveat is that SoftEther will only apply RADIUS authentication to accounts you manually define; so you must create a user in SoftEther and enable RADIUS for them. This may have been fixed by now, but was rather annoying back then!

After reading the product page, this product seems too good to be true (OSS, supports every OS and every type of VPN). Is there some kind of catch? How come I've never heard of it until now?

It's written in C++. /s

I suspect it hasn't gotten a lot of widespread publication in English forums because it's from a University project from Japan so there aren't a lot of English-speaking contributors (there are only 9 contributors to the official repo).

Additionally, it was only open sourced in 2014 so as an open source project it's pretty young.

I know among the pfsense group originally there was skepticism that it wasn't back doored by a government agency (not because there was proof), because of the fact it had such a great feature set while being so new a project. Now that it's open sourced, I'm interested to see if people pick it up. It definitely looks legit.

I have been using it since its early releases in 2003 and the feature set really reflects the continuous development.

I hope you meant 2013. Looks like the earliest beta users were starting 2012.

Before SoftEther went open source, it was sold commercially as early as 2004. It was renamed PacketIX VPN around 2005 and is still sold commercially under that product name at https://www.softether.jp/1-product/11-vpn (it's up to v4.0).

I remember reading that there was a 10-year agreement that finally ended at the start of 2014, allowing the original developer to go open source. The source tree is different from PacketIX's though, so some of the features are still not available yet in the open source version.

I've deployed SoftEther and I can confirm that the software does work incredibly well and is jam packed with features.

I to was concerned with the legitimacy of the software. But it is open source now, which should aid discovery.

I don't use it anymore at the moment. But my gut feeling is it is legit software, but sometimes there is just no way to know...

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