Even though I pretty like OpenVPN, there is still some devices that might not support the TUN/TAP driver needed by OpenVPN.

Take IPhones, Android phones for instance, you need to root them in order to get that feature, assuming somebody has already cooked a ROM for your device.

L2TP is quite and old standard that allow setting up VPNs.

On the other end, it does not provide any kind of encryption mechanism, and as such, it is pretty common to get L2TP running over an IPSec link.

I was trying network-manager-openvpn plugin today on Lucid, I could import my configuration, DNS was set up correctly upon connection/disconnection, route imported correctly (almost :)).

One issue though is that it was also changing the default route to the VPN tunnel while this should not happen.

This tutorial will explain how to run a mail server with virtual domains and users using a MySQL backend to store email informations.
Postfix will be our SMTP server, Dovecot will be handling IMAP (optionally one could configure POP3 also) so that users can retrieve their email.

Another tutorial will cover SPAM fighting using DSPAM based on this implementation (yet to be done).

This tutorial was done on Debian Etch using postfix 2.3.8-2etch4 and 1.0.rc15-2etch4.

this tutorial will explain how to use a MySQL backend in order to authentication users against your Apache website.

To achieve this we will use Apache2 and its auth_mysql module.

While doing a server migration, it happens that some traffic still go to the old machine because the DNS servers are not yet synced or simply because some people are using the IP address instead of the domain name....

By using iptables and its masquerade feature, it is possible to forward all traffic to the old server to the new IP.

This tutorial will show which command lines are required to make this possible.

Vyatta is a Linux based distro that ease the set up of VPN, Routers, antivirus.... It has a really small footprint on your system as it only requires something like 800M to be installed and is based on Debian. On the top of that, it offers configuration wrappers to facilitate service settings.

This tutorial will explain how to set up 2 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) boxes to route the traffic from one Autonomous System (AS) to the other using Vyatta.
Vyatta Community Edition 4.1.4 was used during this set up.

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

• DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
• DNS server to resolve domain names
• Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
• Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job.

As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified.

When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive.

the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh.

The Intel wireless card 4965 AGN does not work properly on ad-hoc networks since hardy and kernel 2.6.24 or around, network-manager can't get it to use the mode ad-hoc and a standard configuration like:

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid mode ad-hoc channel X key s:mykey13charss
$ sudo dhclient wlan0

will fail to get an ip except a long battle at dhclient'ing around.

I managed to get a process to get things working faster.

This tutorial will show how-to connect to a Cisco VPN Concentrator using vpnc.

vpnc is a VPN client compatible with cisco3000 VPN Concentrator which runs in userspace and uses the tun kernel module.