SSH Claims Draw Open Source Ire

JDStone writes to tell us eWeek is reporting that claims of OpenSSH not being an 'enterprise-class product' by SSH Communications, the creators of SSH, is being met with a great deal of resistance. Theo de Raadt, of OpenBSD fame and a member of the OpenSSH development team was quoted saying "OpenSSH is built into all Unix and Linux vendor operating systems, and is also built into almost all larger managed network switches, from Cisco through Foundry. It comes on Linksys and D-Link wireless and security routers too."

Comments

Define enterprise

[russg]

Not that I'm defending SSH, but it really depends on what specifically you are speaking of when it comes to comparing the offering of OpenSSH and SSH Communications. The two products are fairly similiar for base installs and function about the same. The problems with OpenSSH come into play in the enterprise when you want to manage the SSH installs globally or integrate the SSH server with other products.

Two examples from my own experience. We attempted integration with RSA and OpenSSH had significant problems that we had to resolve and in the end we could not resolve the final problem which was a session would hang after exiting the shell if the session was authenticated using the RSA PAM module.

The other example is related to distribution and configuration managment. We have started using SSH communications central management center to distribute new versions of Tectia server as well as centrally manage the configuration for Tectia/ssh. This has reduced our management overhead considerably. This is an "enterprise" feature.

--russ