Random…

There has been a flurry of manufacturers making subnote books. None of them compare to the IBM Thinkpad x60s [0]. I will not be interested in buying one until they do…

1. core duo
2. VT-chip so you can virtualise unmodified guests
3. rugged casing
4. decent battery life
5. a keyboard that will not induce rheumatism after > 2 hours of use. Can you imagine using emacs on an 10″ keyboard?
6. Spare parts that are easy to get
7. Upto 2GB of RAM
8. hard disk protection
9. a “proper” disk size.. how the F^ can any one use 4GB on a disk?
10. wireless, bluetooth and a GPRS module under the keyboard

[0] X60s, read and weep

I wrote a wiki entry for GNU/BLAG Linux, in which I detail setting up a laptop running GNU/Linux so that it can connect to an VPN sitting on an MS box. [0]. One thing I forgot to add was the fact that you still need to configure route(s) to the boxe(s) that you actually want to connect to.

route add -net 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 dev ppp0

Is more or less the command that root needs to run to get this done.

There is a gui tool, kvpnc [1] that does the same thing but the documentation is shyte [2]. It’s a good tool in that it does get you connected to the office’s vpn, but if you don’t know much about networking you’ll be stuck, as you’ll not know how to get a route established in order to talk to the other boxes. That’s probably the main reason why I like console-based tools with text-based configurations. Once you read the docs, (if there are any), or source code, you can more or less work things our for yourself. Which means that after six months you’ll browse over the docs to remind yourself how things work.

apt-cache show kvpnc | tail -n 10
Filename: kvpnc-0.8.8-1.fc7.rf.i386.rpm
Summary: Frontend for various VPN clients
Description:
KVpnc is a KDE frontend for various VPN clients. It supports Cisco VPN (vpnc)
and IPSec (FreeS/WAN, racoon). vpnc is a replacement for the Cisco VPN client,
and is used as client for the cisco3000 VPN Concentrator. FreeS/WAN
(OpenS/WAN) is a IPSec client for Linux 2.4.x, and raccoon is a IPSec client
for Linux 2.6.x and *BSD. It also supports PPTP (pptpclient) and OpenVPN.

[0] wiki entry ppp
[1] kvpnc homepage
[2] documentaion (?) for kvpnc

This server and database got lost during the “great migration”. DB totally corrupted so I killed it. :mwahaha: Aiming to move it to another server soon so watch out - it’s going to break something!

Oh yeah - gonna migrate this blog and other stuff live via openvz and xen to other servers across the European continent and see which one comes out the best for what I’m running. In other words, which is the live migration method that I will use to completely fuck things up all over again.

Completely biased and unscientific report to follow.
grep -i xen /boot/grub/menu.lst
title Xen 3.3 / XenLinux 2.6
kernel /xen-3.3.gz console=vga
module /vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen root=LABEL=/1 ro console=tty0 dom0_mem=524288
module /initrd-2.6.18.8-xen.img