vpn – Grey Panthers Savannah https://grey-panther.net Just another WordPress site Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:40:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 206299117 Moving to an always connected world https://grey-panther.net/2008/10/moving-to-an-always-connected-world.html https://grey-panther.net/2008/10/moving-to-an-always-connected-world.html#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:40:00 +0000 https://grey-panther.net/?p=606 I was browsing through some of the PDC reporting, when this announced feature of Windows 7 caught my eye; DirectAccess. It’s supposed to be a VPN which you don’t have to set up, it just magically works.

Really? I didn’t know that VPN’s were so hard to set up. My personal experience is with managing OpenVPN (on Windows and Linux), but I also used Windows VPN’s with PPTP (again with Windows and Linux clients). It newer took more than 5 minutes to set up, this is counting the installation of software!

In MS view are Windows sysadmins so incompetent that they need a magic pixiedust one-click-does-it-all solution? And if yes, do they think that the same sysadmins who will enable this have any idea about security? “Access all of your network shares from anywhere” – this includes from a stolen laptop.

There needs to be a barrier of complexity for such software, which makes the person who is setting it for the first time read the documentation and hopefully get a few security tips on the way.

]]> https://grey-panther.net/2008/10/moving-to-an-always-connected-world.html/feed 2 606 Setting up a PPTP VPN (client) with Ubuntu https://grey-panther.net/2007/08/setting-up-a-pptp-vpn-client-with-ubuntu.html https://grey-panther.net/2007/08/setting-up-a-pptp-vpn-client-with-ubuntu.html#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:48:00 +0000 https://grey-panther.net/?p=819 This applies to the latest release (7.04), because from what I understand older versions had more (complicated) steps to follow. My solution is based on this blog posting combined with some advice from here. The steps are:

  1. Install the network-manager-pptp package (either by doing sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp, by using Synaptic or any other way you like)
  2. Click on the networking icon and set up your VPN
  3. Issue the following commands (the package installation seems to issue at least some of these commands, however I couldn’t get my VPN to connect until I re-issued them):

    sudo /etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager restart
sudo /etc/dbus-1/event.d/26NetworkManagerDispatcher restart

  4. Profit err – I mean happy VPN-ing
]]> https://grey-panther.net/2007/08/setting-up-a-pptp-vpn-client-with-ubuntu.html/feed 4 819