At work today one of our guys had to connect to a client via some Cisco VPN. He runs Linux. Mandrake I think. Another one of our guys runs Debian, and another Ubuntu. Today it took the Mandrake user (who knows what he is doing as a programmer and can get around *nix pretty well) only 5 hours to get VPN working. I think the Debian and Ubuntu users it took between 2-4 hours to connect to the VPN.
Want to know what the solution was for connecting to the VPN running Mandrake? Running a Windows XP virtual machine and connecting to the VPN.
It should be noted that our machines running Leopard took about 2 seconds to connect to the same VPN with no configuration problems. Even though KDE has a “really cool tool for connecting to VPNs” it really was pretty worthless in the end.
Honestly, I should have gotten up in the morning and gone to the Apple store and bought him a Mac Mini or Macbook. It would have likely saved us time and money.
+1 Apple, +1 Microsoft, -1 Linux.
Someone is going to surely come on here and say, “Oh it’s easy you just do X and X and recompile X”, but lets really just say it wasn’t working. I don’t have the details, I just know that with all of the people here we couldn’t get it working easily. I hate Windows, but I sadly must say that it actually did its job here.
I absolutely LOVE my WRT54GS Linksys/Cisco router. I have the one with 32mb of RAM and this thing is great. I was running the Thibor/HyperWRT firmware on it, but there were a few things I was having problems doing, so I moved to DD-WRT, which I’m liking very much.
I am purchasing a LaCie 500gb network disk soon. The point of this is to serve as a network media drive for myself and my almost-roommate (lives next door) Rich. We’ve got copper running between our apartments with gigabit switching and it seems to work well.
My hope is to get rtorrent/ctorrent installed on the WRT54GS, and have the ability to just drag .torrent files into a folder, which would be checked by a cron job every 15 minutes or so, that would put start up the download of new torrents to the shared network drive. We each use laptops, so keeping downloads going throughout the day is impractical for the most part. This way either of us could initiate the download of torrents (legal ones like WoW patches, or Linux images of course!) and both of us could use the files instantly, without having to wait for the other one to mount hard drives on their laptop.
I’m having problems getting ctorrent to install, using ipkg. Dependancy issues. Grr. If anyone knows more about ctorrent or is a master of the DD-WRT please let me know.
