Products · Product
IPsec
Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 14 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
IPsec is complex, hard to deploy, and hard to implement and useUnreviewed
20132026- Setting up an IPsec link is fiendishly difficult and never got streamlined2025-06-16
- Configuring IPsec clients to agree on ciphers and certificates is painful2020-03-17
- Setting up IPsec is astonishingly hard, with cryptic, minimal error information on Windows2018-02-07
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 18 complaints
- Standards-committee designs become baroque and hard to use2025-12-30
- Setting up an IPsec link is fiendishly difficult and never got streamlined2025-06-16
- Too many configuration options make it nearly unusable2023-08-01
- Setup requires many interdependent settings that differ by vendor, so failures are hard to diagnose2021-10-18
- Users must pick cipher suites, and matching settings across vendors still fails with negotiation errors2021-10-17
- Setting up IPsec tunnels with vendors takes a full day due to complexity2020-03-17
- Setup took days and debugging means waiting hours for tunnel failures without logs2020-03-17
- Configuring IPsec clients to agree on ciphers and certificates is painful2020-03-17
- Configuration is error-prone, with inscrutable failures and unclear tunnel status2020-01-29
- Setup has outdated defaults and error messages and documentation that are hard to act on2019-11-02
- Hard to configure, and working or secure configuration examples are hard to find2019-03-05
- Some implementations are kludgy, lacking granularity and control over configuration2018-07-12
- Setting up IPsec is astonishingly hard, with cryptic, minimal error information on Windows2018-02-07
- Hard to use because of how implementations are built2015-05-19
- Setting up IPsec VPN for Android clients takes too much effort2015-05-19
- IPSec is overly complex, hard to deploy, and annoying to implement and use2015-02-27
- IPSec failed to gain popularity partly due to bad user interface2015-02-10
- Tunnels fail to stay connected and hidden settings must be guessed by trial and error2013-09-08