Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

This one can easily be filed under the “yet another example of things ‘just working’ on mac and being near impossible on ‘linux’”….

My employer currently uses pptp for vpn’ing into the office. Far from the ideal solution security wise, the fact that it is supported on all platforms is a huge plus. This is especially true since the employees use a mix of Windows, Linux, and OSX.

PPTP is trivial to set up on Mac OSX. It’s just entering a few values into a few forms. I’ve never tried on windows, but there have been no complaints. However, linux was a different story. One of my primary motivations for moving to SuSE was that things like this were supposed to be easier. Gone were the days of running through strange command programs and hacking PERL scripts to get things to work.

With pptp, this was not going to be the case. First off, there doesn’t appear to be a gui pptp-client included with the suse installation. So fine, I can break out my Slackware aquired knowledge of the command line and run pptp-command. So far, so good.

I follow the directions on how to configure the secrets, update the resolve.conf, and start setting up the vpn. Everything seems to go fine until I try to run it. Needless to say, I can’t access anything, including stuff on my local network. Eventually I just give up and resort to ssh tunnelling.

Turns out my problem was that I simply didn’t understand the esoteric instructions about routing and I had mis-configured that section. What I had assumed was asking me for 172.16.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 was actually asking for the whole command string for the route command. Of course, I didn’t know this until I got the bright idea to look at the perl. Adding “add -net 172.16.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 dev ppp0″ in the configuration options made everything work.

So granted, this was more a case of me not reading all the documentation. Once I knew where to look, it was pretty simple to figure out. But the point is, I didn’t have to do that on OSX. It “just worked.”

For whatever reason, wireless networking in my house to our Windows computers is spotty at best. Personally, I put the blame squarely on Bill Gates and Stever Ballmer, but that’s besides the point.

Adding more access points might be an option, but one that will require running cables between floors before that’s any help. In the quest for a more immediate solution, I tried to upgrade the the default firmare to one of the many third party linux based firmwares out there. The one I settled on was DD-WRT.

The process would have been very straight forward, except I had the Linksys WRT54Gv5, which meant that I had a lot of extra hoops to jump though. Thankfully, the guys at bitsum found a way to change the firmware without any crazy hardware hacking or special cables.

Unfortunately, the process was far from smooth. Apparently the internal httpd daemon is extremely flakey and will only work with IE (?!). This meant I had to reboot the wife’s computer to Windows. After that the process when relativley smoothly for the first router.

DD-WRT’s interface is much nicer than the default Linksys one. One of the best features is the section that shows you who is associated with the access point and their signal quality. This make it a whole lot easier to debug some of the environmental problems around one of the workstations in the house. Other neat things include status on the memory usage and the load average. Also fun is the ability to increase the power of the attenna to nearly cook food that’s too close levels.

Since I’m using the WRT54G strictly as an accesspoint, I didn’t get to try any of the neat looking firewall stuff.

So far, so good, until it came time to upate the other access point on the network. That’s when the real craziness happened. While I made sure to use unique IP addresses I could never see both wireless networks at the same time. The really oddball bit was that Windows could see one, and was completely unable to connect to the other, Linux only saw one, but could connect to both, and the Mac had no problems at all. Very strange and frustrating. I was completely unable to figure this one out.

Eventually, my only recourse was to return one of the routers back to standard linksys firmware, which was a serious downgrade. On the bright side, I managed to not brick any of the routers.

Unfortunately, this leaves me back at square one. It might be time to get some bigger antennas, or bite the bullet and drop ethernet though the house.