I wrote Swandive because I really needed a VPN for the road. Even though OpenVPN is so easy to set up, it's not compatible with iOS devices, making it a non-starter. IPsec/L2TP are the standards-based way to do it, but it's much harder to set up... all the more so because IPsec relies on some non-standard IP packet types, and my home router isn't capable of handling it. I wanted to run my VPN in EC2 because those machine instances are essentially disposable, but EC2 presents all sorts of new problems...

In the end of the day, it was really non-trivial to get this set up, so I decided to package the process for everyone.