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Cisco to Open Source CTA

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-skate-everyone-skate dept.

VE3OGG writes "Cisco, the networking Goliath, has decided to release the source code of its NAC (network admission control) client, Cisco Trust Agent (CTA) to the open source community within 'a few months.' This comes hot on the heels of Cisco announcing its plans to redevelop a new breed of network security infrastructure. 'CTA will be something that's open source. That's just logically where it should end up,' Gleichauf told InfoWorld. 'We don't want to be in the CTA business, so we're going to just open it up.'"

7 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. ohhh yeah by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    This comes hot on the heels of Cisco announcing its plans to redevelop a new breed of network security infrastructure.

    Yeah, well they've certainly got a NAC for it.

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
  2. VPN by LDoggg_ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does this include the VPN client?

    The last linux release from cisco's site is a year old and the kernel module doesn't compile against the 2.6.19 kernel. Just to get it to compile against 2.6.18 you had to fake a config.h in your kernel source include folder.

    --

    "If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
    1. Re:VPN by c0l0 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Cisco VPN Client sucks arse. There is, however, a much more comfortable and less-sucky free as in speech userspace-implementation for that kind of VPN available at http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/

      I use it to connect to customer's not having set up OpenVPN every day, and it never failed on me yet. Give it a try, you won't regret it. :-)

      --
      :%s/Open Source/Free Software/g

      YTARY!
    2. Re:VPN by schwaang · · Score: 3, Informative

      Vpnc works great but it doesn't do certificates yet like the Cisco client.

  3. Cisco's table scrap by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We don't want to be in the CTA business, so we're going to just open it up.
    Translation :- "Here's something we either can't milk money out of or we're planning to discard altogether, knock yourselves out."
    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    1. Re:Cisco's table scrap by jcgf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You see the same thing over and over, "toss the free software dogs a bone and buy some publicity" the suits think. The only company actually open sourcing anything worth while is Sun and maybe IBM to some extent.

  4. Gift horse by forand · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you really think that they should be giving you their hard work for free? I would love to have companies which abandon or otherwise stop supporting a product give it to the open source community instead of having it lost forever. Just because you find the product they are going to release beyond use does not mean that it is useless to us all.