The Shrew Soft VPN Client is a free IPSEC Client for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be used to communicate with many open source or commercial IPsec VPN gateways to provide an alternative to expensive commercial VPN solutions.
While this software does include advanced features such as Split Tunneling, Split DNS, Nat Traversal, IKE Fragmentation, Packet Pre Fragmentation, Dead Peer Detection, Hybrid XAuth and automatic client configuration, it is still missing some options that are available in the more popular commercial products.
For example, if your remote access needs include support for VPN enabled domain login or stateful client side firewall, this software may not be a good fit for your environment.
The Shrew Soft VPN Client for Windows is a free IPsec Remote Access VPN Client for Windows 2000, XP and Vista operating systems ( x86 and amd64 versions ). It was originally developed to provide secure communications Between mobile Windows hosts and open source VPN gateways that utilize standards compliant software such as ipsec-tools, OpenSWAN, FreeSWAN, strongSwan, isakmpd. It now offers many of the advanced features only found in expensive commercial software solutions and provides compatibility for VPN appliances produced by vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Netgear, Linksys, Zywall and many others.
