Archive for December, 2012
The best of 2012
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal on December 31, 2012
As inspired by Kev: My 5 best moments of 2012 1. Meeting a special someone The person responsible for this knows who they are. They’re making me smile pretty much daily right now, I figure that’s as good a reason as any to be #1 in my list of good things. 2. Going to UWaterloo […]
Now that I’m actually looking for it
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 28, 2012
I’m seeing stuff about China’s blocking VPNs everywhere: New York Times, the BBC, and of course, Slashdot. Interesting tidbit: OpenVPN over TCP on port 53 apparently works. Not sure why it’d be like that, but maybe it’s something unexpected from infrastructure put in place for DNS poisoning. Possibly unrestricted, but mirrored to the DNS servers, […]
Tunneling OpenVPN through SSH
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 26, 2012
Having a bit of time, and remembering that OpenVPN had an option for SOCKS proxies, I decided to take a stab at getting OpenVPN to work through a SOCKS proxy. It was far easier than expected.
Tunneling OpenVPN through stunnel
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 26, 2012
Continuing my string of posts on trying to get OpenVPN working through China’s Great Firewall… and a recent (and unexpected but much appreciated) report that TCP & UDP ports are blocked quickly, I’m now looking at getting OpenVPN to work with stunnel. My assumption is that the GFW is detecting the OpenVPN packets, since they’re […]
Getting OpenVPN to run on random ports
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 22, 2012
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a friend who’s heading to China. I have an OpenVPN server. I thought the two would match together well, but then China went and started to filter & kill OpenVPN connections, and block those IP/port combinations. People are reporting that using a random port (as supported […]
OpenVPN and China’s Great Firewall
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 20, 2012
Slashdot linked to an article on China restricting VPN access, in particular OpenVPN clients. (Also: OpenVPN’s forums has a similar report) The problem seems to be they’ve implemented some sort of protocol detection that’ll flag and block OpenVPN connections after a while. Unfortunately, this is no longer an academic problem for me, since I’ve got a […]
I like uptime
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on December 17, 2012
Sadly, reboots must occur. But that doesn’t mean I can’t wait for a nice time. [root@vps ~]# uptime 16:10:10 up 75 days, 23:59, 2 users, load average: 1.06, 0.69, 0.33 [root@vps ~]# uptime 16:10:42 up 76 days, 0 min, 2 users, load average: 0.59, 0.62, 0.32 [root@vps ~]# reboot
Review of the Manfrotto 055CXPro3
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Photography, Uncategorized on December 16, 2012
I picked up a Manfrotto 055CXPro3 tripod for Christmas 2011. At that time, I started off writing a short review of it, comparing it with my then-current 055XProB. Amazon shipping no problem, earlier than expected price went up after I put it in the cart though center column was damaged in transit, cosmetic marks made […]
A grab bag of half-finished posts
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Programming, Sysadmin, Uncategorized on December 16, 2012
Because I’ve started a bunch of posts, haven’t finished them, don’t really want to delete them but stuff looks potentially useful, and I’m clearing stuff out.
OMG C WHY
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Programming, School on December 16, 2012
The bulk of this was written on Nov 16th before I finished CS137 at UW. Most of this stuff still stands. === (Also, why I’m glad I’m using Git, why I love Stack overflow, and frak yes Valgrind)