Quick post about my new LARP. M3 (Mystics, Monsters, and Magic) is a new LARP (Live Action Role Play) starting in Sydney Australia. Yes, that is correct, Sydney. I’ll be moving there very soon and hope to get M3 active there. Take a look, if you have the notion…
M3 LARP
January 17th, 2010All your calls are belong to Qwest
October 7th, 2009I had a disturbing experience with my cell phone. As many people know, Qwest is dropping their wireless service Oct. 31st. Part of their current campaign to get people to switch to Verizon is to force a redirect of your phone over to their service center. In and of itself, this is annoying. I have already received the 50 million unsolicited text messages telling me the exact same thing. Not to mention the 100 million snail-mail notices. What is disturbing is “how” they redirected this call. First, they shut off all access incoming to the phone (was that really necessary?). So, for a few days, my wife wasn’t receiving a single call and we didn’t know why (until she tried to dial out). Given this, I’m not sure how many calls I may have missed. Second, when calling out, it forced the redirect and to stay on hold until you talked with someone. Hanging up and dialing again didn’t work. The hold time was over 10 minutes (apparently you don’t need to worry about quick customer service when you’re terminating service anyway). Once my wife finally talked with someone they “cleared” the phones. We were then told to turn the power off to our phones and turn them back on to reset. WHAT?!? Somehow, they were able to physically change some aspect on the phone itself to force this redirect (without the phone being powered off/on) as well as not being able to change it back without this power off. Now I’m wondering what other control do they have over my phone. Can they look at my pictures? See what values I’m typing in the calculator? What can they do? This is MY phone, not theirs. I use their service, but it isn’t their phone. I can, at any time, take that phone to a different compatible provider, so what right do they have to alter my phone directly? If this was an ISP in the computer world, I would have already contacted a lawyer/law enforcement for attempting to hack my computer.
I guess its a good thing Qwest is dropping their service, because after this I wouldn’t keep them anyway. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Do other providers hijack phones the same way? Add your comments, as I’m needing to choose a new provider.
C# DataGridView not updating cell if EditOnEnter property set
August 3rd, 2009While programming a little utility, I came across an issue programmatically updating the value of a cell in a DataGridView (.NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008). Before setting the EditOnEnter property, the cell would visually update on the EndEdit() call, however, this broke when I set the EditOnEnter property (I presume because this property sets the grid in a perpetual edit and thus ignores the EndEdit() call). The solution I found was to call RefreshEdit(). Info from Microsoft is here. The basic info is RefreshEdit() refreshes the display of a cell even during editing.
Setting up Client-Server OpenVPN on Vyatta 5 – Part3
June 10th, 2009Vyatta is a great free firewall/routing solution. As of version 5 (I’m specifically using 5.0.2), OpenVPN support was added. OpenVPN is a much better alternative than any of the L2TP/IPSec VPN solutions out there, and with just a little problem solving, I was able to get a Client-Server (aka road-warrior) vpn set up.
In Part1, I explained how to get the certificates and keys generated. Part2 explained how to set up OpenVPN within Vyatta. Part3 explains how to set up the client on Windows.
I went the easy route of downloading the latest OpenVPN 2.1 release candidate which included the latest OpenVPN GUI. Make sure to download 2.1 as apparently Vyatta’s implementation doesn’t support 2.0.
Some documents I read online said to download the latest version from the OpenVPN GUI site, but I found the TUN install to fail on Vista. Apparently the latest Vista SP recognizes the tun0801.sys driver as incompatible and will not start the virtual device. The 2.1 release candidate from the OpenVPN site includes the newer tun0901.sys driver, which installs in Vista x86 & x64.
Proceed with a standard install. Read each installable’s description to determine the need for install. I personally did not install the service component as I would always be initiating the connection.
At this point, the client is ready to connect, but we need to tell it where and how. In Part1 I explained how to create keys for the client. At this point, we need those keys locally. The way I retrieved them from the Vyatta server was enabling SSH on Vyatta and using WinSCP. The required files are ca.crt, clientname.crt, and clientname.key. (where clientname is the name given during Part1)
As the VPN documentation from Vyatta says, create an .ovpn file and make the contents the following.
dev tun
client
remote 12.34.56.78
ca ca.crt
cert clientname.crt
key clientname.key
Place this file in the OpenVPN’s config folder (typically c:\program files\openvpn\config). If the crt and key files are not in the config folder as well, make sure to put full paths to the files and use double backslashes since a backslash is a control character.
At this point, OpenVPN GUI should see the config and allow you to connect.
Additional Note for Vista: OpenVPN GUI must be launched as Administrator (which can be set as a property of the .exe if desired) in order to have permissions to set routes.
Hope this helps.
If you wish to review either of the previous blogs about setting up Vyatta’s OpenVPN or the easy-rsa keys/certs, read Part1 and Part2.
Setting up Client-Server OpenVPN on Vyatta 5 – Part2
June 10th, 2009Vyatta is a great free firewall/routing solution. As of version 5 (I’m specifically using 5.0.2), OpenVPN support was added. OpenVPN is a much better alternative than any of the L2TP/IPSec VPN solutions out there, and with just a little problem solving, I was able to get a Client-Server (aka road-warrior) vpn set up.
In Part1, I explained how to get the certificates and keys generated. Part2 explains how to setup OpenVPN within Vyatta.
- The OpenVPN Client-Server implementation for Vyatta requirs TLS. The keys and certificates for this must be created first (see earlier post).
- Within the new GUI, set up the virtual tunnel interface on Vyatta. Select openvpn under interfaces and press the Create button.
- Enter an interface name, and select the set button. *I was only successful using the name vtun# (where # is a number like eth0, eth1, eth2…)
- After the interface is created, enter the vtun# mode as server
- Set any openvpn-option values needed, such as dhcp or routes, and press the set button. Example: –push dhcp-option DNS 192.168.1.10 –push route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0. This should correlate to the network behind Vyatta with which the clients need to communicate.
- Select server under the vtun# interface and press the Create button
- Enter the subnet you wish the clients to have and select subnet for the topology and press the set button. I commonly use 172.16.x.x through 172.31.x.x as to not conflict with home networks who often use192.168.x.x and businesses who often use 10.x.x.x.
- Select tls under the vtun# interface and press the Create button
- Enter the correct certificate and key files and press the Set button. The crl-file and role are not required.
- ca-cert-file = ca.crt
- cert-file = servername.crt
- dh-file = dh1024.pem
- key-file = servername.key
- Commit your changes
At this point, the OpenVPN configuration within Vyatta is complete, however, the client must still be configured.
