Networking

A short howto, as I was unable to find any clear ones on the net.

I'm using Mac OS X (Leopard) as client, and a Gentoo server as server/host.

I both tried Viscosity and Tunnelblick on my Mac as OpenVPN software, and Viscosity is probably somewhat easier to configure (using the GUI), it was shareware. So I ended up using Tunnelblick and it seems to be doing its job quite well.

First of all, make sure Gentoo is set up and working as intended. I used my home router as VPN server (having both eth0 and eth1 (= ppp0).

I’ve “updated” my previous php-app.

Since today I ended up getting this error:

Warning: imap_open(): Couldn't open stream {imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}[Google Mail]/Spam in /home/yeri/.gmail.php on line 30
Certificate failure for imap.gmail.com: unable to get local issuer certificate: /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc/CN=imap.gmail.com - Connection failed.

Simply searching this line:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/}$path"

And editing it to:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}$path"

Solves the problem.

This will ignore the Google certificate. Please do double check that imap.google.com really points to Google, and it’s not some kind of DNS issue.

I hate having unread mail. I hate having spam. And most of all, I hate spam that asks for attention.

When receiving spam in Gmail, you get the annoying bold Spam (12353434) with ‘12353434’ being the number of unread spam messages.

With the introduction of Gmail Labs I’d hope to see an “automaticly mark spam message as seen” feature, which, well, I haven’t found yet.

Being tired of all these increasing spam numbers, and my daily efforts to “select all unread + mark as read”, I ended up writing a small PHP file which connects to the Gmail (using IMAP, so I asume you’ll need IMAP enabled in your settings..) and marks all spam messages as read. Running this script locally with a curl or cron every X time will solve most of your problems, I hope.

Found a really cool blog post on Twitter yesterday night; really worth the time to read and to understand how 3G is actually working.

I’ve got myself a cheap 500GB network hard disk.

Been testing it, and seems to be working fine! It’s rather fast (it has a SATA2 disk in it) and it was really easy to set up.

But I’m missing a few things;

• Impossible to format/check the disk for errors from the web interface
• Impossible to create partitions from the web interface
• Impossible to give anonymous FTP access (or use different username:password for FTP, as I don't need any passwords on my disk)
• Only FAT32 (read/write) support, and only NTFS (read) support
• Deleting files seems very slow, but perhaps it's my Mac/WiFi that's giving troubles?

I’m emptying my other (old) external disk (160GB), and will add that one to the network disk (you can extend the network disk by adding other USB disks).

Yes yes, it has received a fixed place in our family.

All I need now are a few people to come by and test it; I wonder what the range is like.

The only thing I don’t really like is the “Watch our ad and get 15 mins free inet (daily)”. Ad? Watch? Oh come on… Where is this going?!

I wrote before, that the console version of Hamachi didn’t seem to generate tun/tap driver errors. But after rebooting my Mac I was no longer able to start Hamachi.

Nazgul:hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-osx yeri$ ./hamachi start
25 19:08:15.659 [   0] [14306] tap: connect() failed 2 (No such file or directory)

So I guess I’ll have to wait for a fix after all. :(

Whilst on the move, it’s always handy to be able to send e-mails. Most providers tend to block all SMTP-servers, besides their own. Quite unhandy if you’re on a FON (or… well… open & unsecure) WiFi network.

Here’s a list with all mayor Dutch & Belgian ISPs their SMTP-servers.

My Fon box arrived today!

Ordered it last Saturday (09/02), took just over a week to be delivered (by UPS).

I bought “La Fonera” with a “Fontenna” for just over 6 (!) EUR. Fon’s having this cool promotion that La Fonera only costs around 4 EUR, and if you order a Fontenna with it, you get the Fontenna for just an additional 2 EUR. (And 6 EUR shipping costs. So just over 12 EUR total.)

When playing with KisMAC, I noticed something weird in my /var/log/system.log;

$date com.apple.launchd[1] (tuncfgd$pid) posix_spawnp("/usr/sbin/tuncfg", ...):
No such file or directory
$date com.apple.launchd[1] (tuncfgd$pid) Exited with exit code: 1
$date com.apple.launchd[1] (tuncfgd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

tun is (trying) to restart every 10 (!) seconds. I tried updating Hamachi’s tun/tap drivers, without any success. It kept restarting the process every 10 seconds.

After a bit of Googling, it seemed to be a known problem. So I decided to uninstall Hamachi & the tun/tap drivers.