openvpn rockz!

Another “summer” day. Cycled to uni again and discovered a bunch of colored leafs, so fall is definitely coming.

Spent most of the day with the evaluation of openvpn as an alternative to our ipsec solution. It is a lot easier to setup on the server and on the clients. Of course complexity is reduced a lot, if you only have to maintain one single config file for all clients. It also eliminates all outstanding problems that were still open. So I guess we will recommend to roll out openvpn instead of ipsec.
My quote of the day was “It simply works.”

Had korean food in the evening and asked the cook what kind of ingredients and spices he uses, so that I can try this at home.

sql training

Today was the big day. Of course I could not sleep till 3am (badly messed up biorythm) but I woke up just fine at 7am.

Met Waldemar and arrived on time at 8:30am. We mixed up entrances and names of course but eventually met the right people. I was surprised because I expected older people. I decided to do the training a bit more practical and do live sql examples. Of course the first statements had syntax errors, because I had not verified them. Overall, I thought that it was alright, next time I know what to look out for.

We decided to have lunch at the local uni cafeteria. Repeated my mistake from last week again and took the veggie menu: Rice with no taste and inedible vegeterian stuff. Argh…

The second part went quite well, I demonstrated phpmyadmin and did a little workshop. Waldemar told them something about backups. Since they did not have any more question, we left earlier than anticipated. Used the extra time to buy office supplies.

LUUSA meeting in the evening - for the first time we’ve spent the whole time outside and enjoyed probably one of the last warm summer days. It seems as it is becoming a tradition to order pizza. Delivery guy missed us - as always -, I guess we really need to update the contact information to stop this.

new hostap driver

Unfortunately I had to disable the waproam daemon on my laptop since it does not seem to be compatible with the new hostap drivers. I am still experiencing weird networking issues, like not being able to associate with an accesspoint or obtaining a dhcp lease. The problem goes away when I power-cycle the laptop, though.

crappy day

What a crappy day. I’ve been sitting in front of the computer preparing slides for Thursday. So I’ve missed an entire day of blue sky and sun. Managed to create 60 slides, hopefully enough for 3 hours.

Got an email from access recruiting which politely told me that since I am nearly done with my studies I would not fit into their little assessement center game. Oh well, no free lunch then. At least I got a nice looking cv out of it.

Got another email from thinkgeek telling us that they are not looking into franchising options at the moment.
Just one of those days, I guess…

ipsec ain’t easy

29 degrees. Amazing, so cycled to uni again. Lunch was also a lot better than last Thurday.

We had another scheduled demonstration for our university wlan project. After we’ve solved the firewall issues last week, we ran into another problem. Some sites were not reachable via http. We think that it has something to do with the mtu size since experiments with a mtu size of 1300 were successful. Also ran into more stability problems which are quite bizarre. Sometimes a client could not establish a secured connection. After a restart of the software on the gateway everything was working again. But this is not really a practical solution for a system that is supposed to serve quite a lot of clients simulteanously.

The presentation of the client was quite a desaster. Did not surprise me, because in my opinion it is difficult if not even impossible to create a simple, cheap and secure ipsec solution that supports the major clients (windows, linux, macos) at the moment.

The idea of switching to openvpn came up again. This would mean losing most of the gateway work from the past 3 months but in the end it might be easier and less painful to deploy.

Went for pancakes at the “Cafe Blau”, two Andexer at the Pendel - where we finally saw Nora again - and a Korean soup at the NetzLaden. Even managed to sell 4 geekladen shirts.

work, work, recess, cooking, work.

Started the day with setting up the new webshop for geekladen.de. So have a look and shop till you drop. It’s awesome that you are able to create a webshop within a couple of hours nowadays, although there is still some finetuning to do. I’ve spent the rest of the day preparing SQL stuff for an upcoming training, but I am not really satisified. So, this means I have to spent even more hours during the next day to get something reasonable. I don’t know why I always have such a hard time preparing talks and so on.

During the afternoon I’ve decided to cycle to the “Kottenforst”. I have not done this since a really long time and I was curious to find out if I am still in shape or if I would have a heartattack. There is a steep rise and I was nearly out of breath but I did not have to push my bike. The reward was nevertheless cool. Some peace and quiet in the woods and no annoying rollerbladers. Decided to return through the fields and along the rhine river.

I finally got a wok, so this hopefully means more asian dishes in the future. Had some pork and lots of veggies and it tasted really good.

I’ll try to catch up on email during the next hours, so if you have been waiting for a reply for weeks now, you have a good chance.

just 5 minutes…

I am sure that I did something during the afternoon, but I really can’t remember what it was. Anyhow. Our new geekladen shirts arrived and I was curious about how the new motives look. Since the day was rather nice and not knowing how to get to Ingo, I took the bike, made a quick stop at a supermarket, got two beers at 7:59pm and met David and Waldemar at a train station. Walked all the way through Beuel to Limperich. Caught up with Ingo who got a brand-new kitchen and a knee infection - not related in any way. Inspected new shirts, quite nice. We’ve decided to choose the thicker ones this time. Made more business plans, like finally setting up a webshop to reach a broader customer base. I was getting hungry and someone else needed his hourly beer fix so, went to a pub which was, according to Ingo, just 5 minutes away. Well, he kindly omitted the “multiply that by 6″ part. He entertained us with some historic facts about old vineyards at least. Arrived at the pub at 10:10pm and found out that the kitchen closed at 10pm. Got a brewed beer but it was not outstanding. The “Weizen” was however disgusting and tasted like, well, no, I spare you the exact description. Made the “5 minutes” way back to Ingo’s home and walked back to Bonn almost starved - luckily Waldemar had a snack: some dried pears with wassabi. They tasted good but could have been a bit more spicier. Discussed various food dislikes on our way back. Decided to stop at the local McD and got a big mac and a salad. Stopped at the Netzladen and stored the new shirts. Drove home and discovered a new wok, so new cooking experiments will be ahead!

setting maximum days of password age

Since I’ve switched to Samba 3 I had the annoying problem, that my password had a relatively short expiration time. I’ve just found the following hint to change this to a a higher value:
pdbedit -P “maximum password age” -C 7776000
The value is in seconds, so 7776000 is approximately 3 months.

Scary

As I was writing the last entry, I was listening to Coldplay’s album - “a rush of blood to the head”. I’ve just finished watching episode 1 from season 3 - and the end credits were from Coldplay, a rush of blood to the head. Quite scary. Anyhow, great beginning of the episode -the writers are truely evil and I still have some disbelief.

SFU - season 2

Just finished season two of Six Feet Under. I was really pleased with season two - great acting and some surprising and bold plot twists. The cast is really outstanding and it is good to have another tv show that does not portray a perfect life all the time. The last episode is my favorite one for season 2. Wow, what a cliffhanger. Good, that I don’t have to wait a couple of months and can watch the first episode of season three right away.

ipsec+netfilter madness continues

I wrote an email to Patrick McHardy hopping to get a newer patch and some clarification about what his patch is trying to achieve. Apparently there is a policy helper module in the patch-o-matic ng tree which you can use to apply special filtering rules to encrypted packets. Spent half of the day reading old netfilter+ipsec threads on mailinglists. If you are curious, read here, here and there!

Cycling, Eating, Hacking and Drinking

My weather prediction seems to be right again. After it rained on most days during the second part of August, we are getting a nice, warm, well even hot, September start. Therefore I’ve decided to cycle to uni. There is often strange food during semester break in our cafeteria but today I ate the most disgusting food ever. I don’t know who came up with the idea of tofu gyros, it does not even sound right. D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G! Hacked the rest of the day on our ipsec gateway and got lost on ipsec with netfilter on kernel 2.6. F-U-N! There is a patch for ipsec with netfilter from Patrick McHardy, but it did not apply to 2.6.8.1. After some bitkeeper browsing on the 2.6 kernel source tree, Waldemar was able to produce a patch that compiled. However we eventually used a different approach with marking the encrypted packets since we both could not figure out, what the patch is trying to change.

We wanted to spend the evening in a beer garden and bumped into friends - Home at 3am after a couple of beers and one Jägermeister.

Screwing around

I’ve fixed my bike today which was a bit broken after nlz’s party. Kids: Don’t drink and cycle and if you do, trust your brain, if it tells you to get off that bike. The longest repair part was to actually find the right tool, a specific screwdriver. I hate searching for stuff, especially if I did not move it.

Oh, something entertaining, my first post on the Internet dates back to May 1994, although I have been active since 1993 on the so-called Z-Netz (a discussion network amongst bulletin board services). Well, the good old days, where hardly anyone knew the Internet and mail took days and sometimes even weeks. Guess, we’ve made some progress in the last decade.

The Butterfly Effect

Went to the movies and watched “The Butterfly Effect”. I really liked it and I was surprised about Ashton Kutchers performance. I did not expect to see him in a serious movie. The movie made me wonder and realize that it is probably never possible to always do the right and best thing but that you should nevertheless strive to do the right and best thing. I would have liked it, if the movie finished a bit earlier but I guess Hollywood does not allow a movie without some sort of happy ending. Oh, and there was at least one part where the whole cinema jumped in their seats.