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Countryside Council for Wales |
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Enterprise Overview
Sector: Regional authority
Size: Large, 660
Offices: 13
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Quote
"We appointed Sirius Corporation because they were the only Catalist-approved Open Source company with the specialist knowledge to undertake the work."
Gordon Ross, Network Manager, Countryside Council for Wales
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What is Countryside Council for Wales?
www.ccw.gov.uk
The Countryside Council for Wales is the Welsh Assembly Government's wildlife conservation authority for Wales. It acts as a statutory advisory and prosecuting body, and aims to sustain natural beauty and wildlife and provide opportunities for outdoor enjoyment of the Welsh landscape and its inshore waters.
Business Situation
The Countryside Council for Wales wanted to create a star-type VPN between Cisco 837 ADSL Modem/Routers (running IOS 12.4) at satellite offices and a central OpenBSD server.
In order to ease administration and reduce security exposure, the client wanted the authentication mechanisms to use X.509 certificates rather than pre-shared keys.
Sirius Corporation was asked to investigate the problem and, if necessary, improve the interoperability of OpenBSD and Cisco's IOS platform. The client stipulated that any development work was to be fed back into OpenBSD project for inclusion in future releases.
The Solution
The Countryside Council for Wales instructed Sirius Corporation under the government's Catalist scheme, a framework agreement designed to help public sector agencies purchase services from established and reputable suppliers.
We approached the project in three phases:
- Exploration: an initial report was prepared to outline the problems experienced, their root cause and the client's options going forward.
- Code Development: Sirius liaised with the OpenBSD team to write new code which allowed OpenBSD to work with the new extensions introduced with IOS 12.4. Patches and technical documentation were made available to the client for knowledge transfer and testing.
- Code Submission: further development work to the code was undertaken to meet OpenBSD's stringent quality control procedures before its incorporation to the project's source tree.
The Benefits
- OpenBSD expertise to core team level and the ability to make submissions to the project's CVS repository.
- Extensive experience with Cisco IOS.
- Sirius is an approved Catalist sub-contractor which allowed the client to follow best practice guidelines in the procurement of ICT services.
Technologies
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