Computer Tips -Tech Info

Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious […]

For quite some time I’ve been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I’m out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly […]

The days of relying on WPA or WPA2 as your online layer of wireless security may be numbered. A new technique that makes use of NVIDIA’s newer GPU’s to do some of hte processing means that it’s possible to break “forgotten” keys about 100 times faster than was previously possible. This means a key could […]

http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ is an interesting bundle of linux designed to be an out of the box network service swiss army knife of sorts. Here are the network services that it provides…. Kerberos 5 authentication, LDAP, NIS, Radius authentication, x509 certificate authority, unix and windows compatible active directory services, router, implements bridging and vlan protocols, full radius […]

The last time I used openvpn, it was version 1.x and only supported a single connection per running process. So, if you had a server that you wanted to support multiple clients connecting, you had to… have multiple ports open to the outside world (unless you did something VERY fancy), and had to have as […]

After the Hamachi article I wanted to do a series on OpenVPN. I’ve used it before, but not since the 1.x days…. it’s now at version 2.0.5 and has quite a bit more flexibility. When I first used it, it was pretty much a point-to-point vpn solution. You could set up routing to see the […]

A few days back I was at grc to run a “shields up” scan on a clients machine and found reference to their Security Now podcast (Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson.) The cast was about a VPN tool called Hamachi… so I revisited and gave a read to the Security Now! transcript. And then visited […]

Sorry, VERY bad pun but I couldn’t resist. I mentioned that I was having tun difficulties that kept me from playing around with anything fancy networking-wise with qemu. For starters let me see if I can explain what tun is. Tun is a method of creating a point-to-point “imaginary” network connection between a program and […]