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Stendec

Member

Registered: 2017-11-15

Posts: 3

Difference between starting strongswan service and using "ipsec start"

Hi All,

While trying to connect to a L2TP/IPsec VPN I found this page helpful. In the end, however, I ended up using strongswan instead of openswan to get my configuration working. So everything works fine, but when I wrote a script to automate connection I found that starting the strongswan.service was not required. All I need to do is run "ipsec start" to get strongswan up and running.

So, purely for my own curiosity: Is there a difference between starting the service and using "ipsec start", and is it important?

Thanks

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,525

Website

Re: Difference between starting strongswan service and using "ipsec start"

All the service does is run 'ipsec --start', but allows it to then be supervised by systemd so it's started at boot and restarted as needed.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-05-04 18:13:41)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman