What is the fate of Kiwi Secure Tunnel?

Question

The company I work for is a happy paying customer of Kiwi Syslog, Cattools, Log Viewer, and Secure Tunnel. We're using the Secure Tunnel extensively at our remote sites, national and international, to sefely and securely tunnel our syslog traffic back to our central syslog server.

In the announcements, Kiwi's page, and Solarwind's page, this product appears to have vanished. What is the fate of this product? It fills a very unique niche and I would very much hate to lose it.

Thank you.

Jason

chris.lapoint · Answer

UPDATE:  We’ve been providing the networking community with free network management tools since the company was founded a decade ago. That’s why we’ve decided to discontinue sale of Kiwi Secure Tunnel and make it openly available as a free tool to the SolarWinds and Kiwi user community.

As part of our release of Kiwi Secure Tunnel as a free tool, we’ve added all features of the licensed version with the following exceptions:

* Client: Limited to 50 incoming TCP connections
* Server: Limited to 50 incoming client connections
* Transmit pacing:  Limited to a maximum of 4 Mbps

You can find the free version here:  www.solarwinds.com/.../related_tools.aspx

Happy tunneling!

kwb · Answer

I use the Secure Tunnel similar to above: (cut and paste)

* Buffers locally to disk when needed - Those same WAN links occasionally fail too. When the link comes back, the remote client then sends the accumulated syslog messages to the server. 
* Rate limiting of the TCP tunnel - the remote client won't swamp your link, especially after a link fails, comes back up, and the remote client tries to empty the buffer. 
* SSH Encrypted - Log messages can tell people a lot about your network, systems, and servers. Especially when crossing the Internet from site to site, encrypting the log data is critical to your security. 
* Compression - Syslog messages are text and tend to be highly repetative. Using compression saves a lot of traffic. This is still very important in some parts of the world where a 1.5 Mbps Internet conenction still costs thousands of dollars a month. The compression must be done BEFORE the encryption to be useful. (Properly encrypted traffic is non-compressible.)

rolltidega · Answer

I completely agree on Kiwi Secure Tunnel.  We use it to get remote syslog from customer firewalls.  We are currently having an issue with it and I am not sure how to get support for it!  Secure Tunnel is a great product with a few minor downfalls.  I really wanted to see a management console built that could manage multiple remote Kiwi Tunnel Clients so that upgrades could be pushed to them without having to remote desktop to all of them out there (the source code being published out there would make it easier for the community to build this functionality).  We have almost 100 tunnel clients out there so not knowing the fate of the product actually scares me a bit.  :-)