14 Dec 08 Debian Lovers – Why I love Voyage Linux

For those Debian lovers I have finally found a great embedded distro. I’ve always stayed away from the multitude of distros available, each with their own package manager or lack of, each with their own preinstalled software or again, lack of, and each with their own caveats.

I began my jorney into Linux with SuSE about 11 years ago at the time of writing, and have also given RedHat a fair chance in the past. In my first employment I was forced to battle against Slackware for two years, and about 7 years ago, discovered Debian.
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Tags: alix, Alix Robot, apt, debian, distro, embedded distro, package manager, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, Voyage, Voyage Linux

01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 1 – The Device

I put this device together for fun sometime around the start of 2007. The ideas that spawned this was using OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54G access point. A surprisingly powerful and full linux distro with all kinds of advanced capabilities running on a Linksys wireless router which I’d previously thought to be a reasonably dumb device with computing power more comparable to a calculator than a PC. The project opened my eyes to embedded devices, and I wondered what device base I should start with. To cut a long story short and for reasons that I can’t even remember anymore I came across the Mikrotik Routerboard 532A and decided that I should start with that.

Conception

Here’s a picture of the device from the outside with some labels, view the full image to see them.

1. Status LEDs. Blue at the bottom left shows it’s on, orange at the top right shows that there’s wifi activity.
2. Ethernet (eth0)
3. Standard Serial Console (57600, 8 N 1)
4. Ethernet (eth1)
5. Ethernet (eth2)

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Tags: adsl2+, APNIC, APNIC Box, distro, ethernet, isp, linksys router, Linux, Linux routing, modem, openwrt, picolcd, public IP, redundancy, routerboard 532a, serial console, switch

15 Sep 08 Quick Linux and Windows OpenVPN HOWTO and tutorial, including VPN routing

OpenVPN is a popular Windows/Linux VPN Server/Client pair. I think there’s a separate GUI available for it if you’re so minded. This howto will cover command line usage only.

I’ll provide example configuration based on a Linux server and a Windows client, however the same applies pretty easily if you wanted to mix and match.

On debian, apt-get install openvpn. On any other linux distro, use your own package manager or alternatively download from source and compile.
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Tags: 10.8.0.1, 10.8.0.2, apt-get, client, compile, compression, daemon, daemonize, debian, default gateway, distro, established, forward, generate, interface, IP address, iptables, ip_forward, keepalive, Linux, linux server, masquerade, nat, openvpn, package manager, ping, related, remote, route, route add, route delete, route print, routing, secret key, server, source, tap, tcp, tcpdump, traffic, tun, udp, VPN, vpn client, vpn server, windows, windows client