Archive for category Sysadmin
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
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.
Fixing the RPC: S-5:AEC-0 error in Google Play
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin, Uncategorized on December 6, 2012
Fix in short: switch Google Play to a different Google Account, and switch back to the original account. It can be a new Google account, or one that already exists on your phone. I hope that helps, and if you want screenshots & more details, read on. 🙂 (Short version because, apparently, this post is […]
More CS137 setup… stuff
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, School, Sysadmin on November 11, 2012
Because I am feeling accomplished, and because I also want to avoid my physics homework. I think I’ve got a pretty good system working for CS137 (and the UW CS servers) now. I’ve got: sshag working, so I don’t have to eval `ssh-agent` && ssh-add each time I open a new screen session a modified […]
Getting OpenVPN to work on an OpenVZ VPS
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on September 28, 2012
Note: This is a personal VPN, so I just used static keys. A general guide to getting OpenVPN set up is available on the OpenVPN website, but this guide is targeted at CentOS 5 on an OpenVZ VPS. This guide should be usable in other RH derivatives without much (any?) modification; and with slight modifications […]
iptables fun and games
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on September 28, 2012
Note to self: When configuring iptables, don’t copy + paste /sbin/iptables -F /sbin/iptables -P INPUT DROP <bunch of other commands> into bash. I had A Bad Time.
VPS Playtime
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on September 25, 2012
So… I found a cheap VPS for me to play around with on LowEndBox after a few weeks of lurking on their site. $12/year for 256MB ‘guaranteed’ RAM, 15GB of disk space and 300GB of bandwidth. I am pleased. Except for the fact that it’s an CentOS OpenVZ instance, and I have had bad experiences […]