2010 ~ Uptime

Monday, December 20, 2010

OpenVPN and Squid for the Holidays

Christmas vacation has started. For some of us who would like to do some work from home, Virtual Private Network(VPN) is the solution. In this entry, I'll describe the OpenVPN setup I made on an Ubuntu 10.04 Server.

The main requirement I'd like to address is to be able to connect to the office network (10.0.3.0/24) to which our development server(10.0.3.5) is attached. This development server is not public. Also, I would like to be able to access the online journals (ACMDL, Elsevier, SpringerLink,IEEE) which require IP address authentication.

The physical server is an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz with 512MB RAM and
40GB disk space. It has two NICs, with one connected to the DMZ(public IP) and another to the office network(with IP 10.0.3.252).

I installed Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS then followed the steps here to install OpenVPN. Although, L2(Data Link) is described in the tutorial, I implemented L3(Network) which I think is simpler. After which, I added a static route in the office router (10.0.3.254) to allow the VPN clients (10.8.0.x) to access the office network.

ip route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 10.0.3.252

National Academy of Science Technology 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting Experience

12:14 AM Research No comments

Scientific conferences delight me. I attended that 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology last July 15, 2010. It was my first time to attend the event. Professor Jaderick P. Pabico asked me to present our poster entitled: A Cellular Automata Approach for Wide-Area Simulation of Runoff and Flooding: The Case of the Laguna Lake Catchment.

The gathering was a big time event. There were a lot of Filipino scientists present. Several speakers, who are NAST Academicians and National Scientists, gave talks that address the progress of our beloved country in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The awarding ceremony was very inspiring, particularly the Outstanding Young Scientist (OYS) award.

I am proud that our institute is home to an Outstanding Young Scientist (Prof. Jaderick P. Pabico) and a NAST Academician (Dr. Eliezer A. Albacea)!

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my IBM Thinkpad R50e

11:38 PM Linux 1 comment

I decided to upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 LTS the other day. I was hoping the installation will be smooth. However, the installation suddenly stopped after a few minutes with the display going blank and disk activity stopping. After some googling, I found out that is a bug that occurs in systems with Intel graphics adapters. I found a workaround here. Specifically, I switched to VESA as the graphics driver to use during the installation by passing some options to the kernel.

I used the following partitioning scheme:
/ - 10GB
/home - 5GB
/opt - 3GB
swap - 500MB

The next step then is to customize the installation and add additional software. Before that, I need configure the dual screen setup. Since VESA does not support dual screen, I need to change the driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to "intel". However, this causes the system to hang. The workaround I followed is to use a kernel from Karmic(2.6.31-20-generic). Installing a new kernel is new to me since 10.04 uses GRUB2 and there is no longer /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The following are the initial packages I installed to get a functioning system ready for work:
*Acrobat Reader (for reading journal articles)
*Thunderbird (for email)
*Flash Plug-in (for watching great table tennis matches)
*MPlayer and gecko-mediaplayer (for listening to RJ100)
*VLC (for watching Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother)
*GYachE (for allowing me to see "invisible" people in YM)
*build-essential,qemu,nasm (for OS programming stuff)
*Subversion (for checking out source code of projects)
*vpnc (for allowing me to connect to ICS VPN)
*GVim (may favorite text editor)
*XAMPP (I use this for PHP and MySQL programming instead of the packages from Ubuntu itself)

So far, my 10.04 experience is great!