All 2 entries tagged Vpn

Where am I?

Writing about web page http://go.warwick.ac.uk/vpn

If you are one of those people who might be able to tell where I was when I posted this by looking at logs, you'd think I was on campus because of the IP address. Except I'm not. I'm at home. Magic? No, it is of course merely sufficiently advanced technology in the form of a VPN.

The System Requirements for Linux machines for some reason single out two distributions, presumably those known to meet the requirements listed afterword. I'm using openSUSE 11.3 which isn't on the list but it seems to work fine. The only glitch I've seen is that when the client install finished it told me "If you have GTK 2.10.0 or later, look for the icon in the notification area:" and there was no such icon, even though a quick visit to whatismyip showed the connection had worked. Selecting the Cisco client from the Application Browser resulted in the icon appearing as expected though.

One very minor gripe I have is that the client installation process doesn't bother to tell you what it's installing or where it's installing it. A quick bit of detective work reveals it puts stuff in /opt/cisco (and a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications) and there's a script called vpn_uninstall.sh in there.

Mike Willis : 07 Oct 2010 20:54 |  Tags: Linux Vpn |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hotspot VPN vs Asus Eee PC

Writing about web page http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wireless

I've recently got my hands on an Asus Eee PC 901. I got the version which ships with Linux (Xandros heavily modified by Asus) on it since I'm that way inclined. I found that whilst it is possible to use the pre-loaded software to connect to the University's Hotspot VPN, doing so doesn't result in connection that is actually usable.

The reason for this turns out to be because the default behaviour of the included VPN client is to re-use the IP address that the Hotspot network has assigned to the machine's wireless connection for the VPN connection. The VPN server doesn't like that.

The solution is to tweak the configuration file for the VPN connection so that it uses the IP address assigned by the VPN server. Assuming there's only one VPN connection set up on the machine then the config file is /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1 and the option noipdefault needs to be added as an extra line at the end.

There's various ways to edit the file, arguable the fastest being to tap Ctrl-Alt-T which brings up an xterm window in which you can run

$ sudo kwrite /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1

After which the last few lines of the file should look like:

/home/user> tail -5 /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1
lock
noauth
nobsdcomp
nodeflate
noipdefault

Full connection guide with screenshots and such like can be found here.

Mike Willis : 20 Jan 2009 15:56 |  Tags: Eeepc Hotspot Linux Vpn |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem