Aun’s Blog

Migrating from Windows to Ubuntu

I was primarily a Windows user, before I started to play around with Ubuntu. First off, I installed it on my home laptop, to see how well it would work… I was thoroughly impressed. Of course, on this laptop, I didn’t need anything but a browser, pidgin, and the basic Office suite. The real test was going to be switching to Ubuntu at work. Migrating away from the beast, Outlook, to Thunderbird / Lightning. Surprisingly, it was very easy:

• Install Thunderbird on your Windows box (the one with Outlook)
• Fire it up, and you’ll get the option to Import - follow the steps to import from Outlook
• After the mail is imported, browse to the C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\(username)\. Copy the folder with the random letters.

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Tags: linux, outlook, thunderbird, ubuntu, Windows

64-bit IPSec VPN client for *nix

Looking for a Cisco IPSec VPN Client to use on your 64-bit *nix OS? Well, for those of you who have already figured out that Cisco has not developed one for 64-bit OS’s, there is, however, a great alternative for people who use a 64-bit *nix OS. As mentioned in a previous post, there is a client developed by Maurice Massar that works with Cisco VPN Concentrators (ASA, 3000 Concentrator and IOS Routers), called vpnc that has worked well for me thus far. I have been using it on my 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 desktop, and have yet to see any issues. You can use vpnc with Cygwin on Windows, however, I am not sure how well Cygwin works with 64-bit Windows.

Disclaimer: This client is not developed or supported by Cisco Systems. So, use at your own risk.

Installed Ubuntu and loving it!

Installed 64-bit Ubuntu on my z61p - it “just works”! The best part of it was the live cd, which allowed to me to preview it on the laptop without installing it. Worked flawlessly! Impressive! Time to install. On the Desktop of  your “live” session, there is an Install link. Double-click and you’re on your way! Wooooo!! It takes the settings from your live session and configures them on your actual installation - perfect! Now, to make this my primary workstation, the only thing I would need is to be able to VPN into work. There is no 64-bit Cisco IPSec VPN Client! Alas! A quick search through the Synaptics Package Manager for “vpn”, I found vpnc. Worked like a charm! Ubuntu far exceeded my expectations. I… LOVE… IT!

Adjusting Daylight Savings (DST) on older FreeBSD releases

A lot of people run older releases of FreeBSD, and probably came across this problem of updating the time zone info. Unfortunately for me, I inherited the box and its ports were way outdated - they wouldn’t even update. Rather than having to go through downloading the ports package, and extracting it, I thought I’d just do a little bit of googling around and see how to update the zoneinfo manually, then work on upgrading the OS completely later. Here’s what I found - its pretty straight forward:

myfreebsd> fetch ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
/// As I just needed northamerica, that is all I extracted from the tzdata pack
myfreebsd> tar -xvzf tzdata2007c.tar.gz northamerica
/// Use zic to compile
myfreebsd> zic northamerica
/// Run tzsetup and select the timezone so the info can be written to /etc/localtime
myfreebsd> tzsetup


Please note that the tzdata?????.tar.gz file is frequently updated, so the above script should reflect that. You can find the latest file at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/.

That should do it. To test, change the date to March 12, and see if the time zone changes from ‘S’ to ‘D’, e.g. CST to CDT.

Do let me know if this does not work for you, or if you have any suggestions for improvement to this tiny script.

Upside-Down-Ternet

A friend of mine forwarded me this link. If you want to have fun with people piggybacking off your wireless network, check it out. The author doesn’t mention it but a Linux box would serve as your router out to the Internet, using IPtables for NATing / Routing and Squid as the Proxy. His trivial redirector (which can be called through squid) basically uses wget to grab the images and mogrify to modify and present them. It sure looks like fun - I will definitely try it out when I get time. IPTables, Squid and wget are easily available as rpm’s, as I’m sure mogrify is.