vpn

In the spirit of “this took me way too long”, here’s how to boot an instance with a CD-ROM on OpenStack, using Terraform. Why would I need this? In a perfect world, I have templates to bootstrap instances. Means, the instances are ready to go when booted. I customise them with cloud-init and let them do all kinds of cool (or necessary) stuff like configuring the network, setting hostnames, adding user accounts and then maybe joining them to a cluster....

In order to connect to firewall and DRACs of our new Rackspace cluster, I had to setup a VPN connection. Rackspace gave us a Cisco ASA device which is firewall and vpn in one. In order to connect to the VPN the client needs to do 2-factor authentication. At first I tried to install the necessary add-ons for Ubuntu’s network-manager, but after I spent an hour or so trying to make it work, I took an alternate route....

This article briefly describes how you can setup the Giganews VPN (PPTP) on Ubuntu. I’m gonna assume 10.04 (that’s what I tested with) and the gnome desktop. Does this sound familiar: The VPN connection ‘xxxxx’ failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. If so then I’m hoping this article will help you. What is a VPN for? The use-case for a VPN — and this is for basically any VPN (not just Giganews’ service) — is security....