Debian Stretch on the Thinkpad T410

A little screenshot of the fresh Debian setup on the T410, or the XFCE desktop, actually.
Nothing new, the standard comfy & usable ole XFCE.

The install went really smooth, only thing I had to setup// install after the actual installation was the non-free drivers for the WiFi card (iwlwifi).

As usual, an encrypted LVM, with a whole partition for / (to save disk space).

As for packages, also went for the usual.
Of course XFCE, SSH Server & the mandatory "Standard System Utility".
IIRC, it somethig less than 2 GB of HDD space when finished.

The screenshot on the left shows stuff as it is with all the necessary packages installed to call this setup home, that is, on top of the base XFCE install:

• Zile
• Chrome
• Dropbox (at least for now)
• OpenVPN
• Evolution
• Links2

I obviously have to fix that icon volume on the Panel ultra ASAP... It reminds me of the whole Wicd icon thing a couple of weeks ago.

Lessons From Username Changing

So, I decided to change the username I've been using for like ever on my Linux setup.
It was pretty much painless, except for a couple of glitches...

External USB
I have an (encrypted) external USB that I use for backups.
It is necessary to chown for the new username in order to actually access the files, after decrypting and mounting it

Portability Issues
The change also forced me to address a couple of small humps, strangely enough, both related to OpenVPN.
First, I had to change the aliases I use to connect to the VPNs, stupidly I was sourcing the whole path, replacing that with "~" fixed this.
The other one was with the certs, CA & keys that the *.ovpn files were referencing...
Those were called with the whole path, and replacing that with "~" didn't work, so what I did was placing the key, CA, certs you name it on the same *.ovpn.
It worked like a charm, and on top of that, it tidy up the whole thing.

OpenVPN: Use MRTG To Graph Connected Users To The VPN

This is a little and simple shell script I wrote to graph using MRTG the number of users who are connected to a VPN server.
The script is really, really simple (as this VPN setup).
It searches for a string on a log file, and then counts and graphs how many times that string appears.
The script itself (simply edit the LAN to suit your needs):

#!/bin/sh

LOG='/path/to/your.openvpn.log'
LAN='10.17.25.'

if [ `cat $LOG | egrep $LAN | wc -l` = 0 ]
then
    echo `cat $LOG | egrep $LAN | wc -l`
    echo `cat $LOG | egrep $LAN | wc -l` Logged Users
else
    echo `cat $LOG | egrep $LAN | wc -l`
    echo `cat $LOG | egrep $LAN | wc -l` Logged Users
fi

# EoF #

And then the MRTG configuration file snip:

###############################
## Users connected to the VPN
###############################
Target[local_openvpn]: `sh /path/to/script.sh`
Options[local_openvpn]: nopercent,gauge,noinfo,nobanner,noo
Title[local_openvpn]: Number of VPN Connections
MaxBytes[local_openvpn]: 100
YLegend[local_openvpn]: Users
ShortLegend[local_openvpn]:
LegendO[local_openvpn]: VPN Users:
Legend2[local_openvpn]: VPN Users
PageTop[local_openvpn]: Users Logged to The VPN
WithPeak[local_openvpn]:wmy
Legend4[local_openvpn]: Max number of users on the VPN

Migrations Are A Bitch

Completely and totally covered by work.
Right now migrating 3 servers from a remote office to "the cloud"...
Taking a VPN (OpenVPN) and a Nagios monitor server fron two stand alone boxes onto a virtual, petite, dirt cheap Ubuntu Server on Digiral Ocean...
Things went sorta smooth, setting up and getting up & running the OpenVPN server was pretty much straight forward (this is the first time I setup an OpenVPN server from zero, i've used an Endian Firewall before).
Migrating Nagios was also pretty pretty easy (from another Ubuntu Server), simply copied the config files, and edit the /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg file, and presto.
Will keep polishing things off the next few days...

PF Sense setup (I)

Will try to keep a journal (daily, hopefully) of what I'm doing on the PF setup.

Today got the OpenVPN up & running; it way more complex than doing so if you run, say, Endian, as your router/ firewall/ UTM solution; but once it is up and running, it seems, it feels more robust.
By far, the greatest PITA is setting up the PKI files.

This is the openvpn line to connect as client, for the moment, at least:

sudo openvpn --client --pull --comp-lzo --nobind --dev tun \
--ca ~/ca.crt --cert ~/certificate.crt --key ~/key.key \
--remote my.pf-sense.router --proto tcp