Zeno was down for about 24 hrs. No, it was not a fatal crash, i merely took desparate measures and powered off the machine remotely, to try and figure out what was causing zeno to bog down to a crawl. After a cold boot on a cold cpu, it runs smoothly.. which seems to indicate that the cpu fan could need replacing. Too bad i’m 4000km away!
I am in Vegas, again. Tonight i’m at the Hilton, where they have internet access in the rooms; earlier this week i was at the Riviera where they do not. Once again, we worked like dogs everyday (including a 36 hour nonstop festival) and had time for few breaks. Finally, today we were done about 8pm, and it was time to stop, and have a few beers. My boss’s plane departs in about an hour, but i don’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. In the morning I have a short (i hope) meeting with some folks in the IT dept. here at the hotel, and then i go for lunch with a good friend. And then i probably get to do it all again next month. Whee!
The latest freeswan differs from the version i am used to. It has an extra little feature where a script (by default “_updown”) will be executed after key negotiation and authentication is complete, and the secure tunnel has been set up. Unfortunately, the default script does not work, or at least, doesn’t seem to work for net-net tunnels (i gather it is designed for host-host tunnels). So everything works except until i figure out the semantics of writing my own script, i have to manually add an entry to my routing table in order to have my secure tunnel actually work properly. This is not a bad thing, for me, but it sure drives home the point that linux, and many apps, are not for newbies, IMHO.
Today i am setting up my new firewall, since the old one has flaky hardware, an old kernel, uses ipchains instead of iptables, and doesn’t have freeswan on it - a collection of issues i just couldn’t survive with anymore. The new one is a PII 233 that cost me $50 CDN (including taxes and shipping); a nice speedy upgrade from the old P75.