Le yann des bois

Configuring and using Untangle: if it doesn’t work restart from scratch !

yanndesbois — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:18:38 +0000

After several days of different experiments with Untangle, in particular around its OpenVPN feature, I have come to a conclusion… Untangle is a great tool, very easy to configure, but it’s better not to continuously tamper with the configuration.

Things tend to break when you play too much, and then without warning after a few manipulations which should not really impact it your DHCP will stop working or your VPN will not start… Once I acknowledged that fact all became easier: play, experiment, then restart from scratch to build a production environment…

Setting up a VPN with openVPN through Untangle

yanndesbois — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:50:49 +0000

I have had an Untangle bridge (www.untangle.com) running in our main office to monitor and protect our internet connection. Yesterday I configured the Untangle openVPN service to be able to access the internal network for ouside (ie home).

The only tricky part of the setup was, as one could expect, to configure the router and PIX firewall to allow traffic from our satellite connection to the Untangle server. Once this was achieved, I just used the Untangle openVPN wizard to set it up. I then connected to the Untangle server from my laptop through the https interface and could directly download the client software and certificate in a single executable for installation.

After the first installation I could establish the connection but was unable to connect to any machine on the remote network. After fiddling a bit with the settings I realised this could be the result of previous experiments with openVPN so uninstalled it and removed all configuration files manually. I then reinstalled the openVPN client and this time all went fine – acces to the file server, acces to intranet.

One more good point for Untangle. Apart from the router/firewall configuration part which is unavoidable, the whole setup was done in a couple of hours including the troubleshooting of the client configuration.

Booting on a USB key with an ISO image on it

yanndesbois — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:31:14 +0000

That was my challenge of the day… Fed up of looking for blank CDs to burn ISO images of CDs I needed to boot on, fed up of the errors that appear so often on RW CDs, I went looking for a more clever solution: Putting the ISO image on a USB key and booting from it.

After some googling I found 2 ways, one was to use UnetbootIn (http://UNetbootin.sourceforge.net/) and the other one was through Grub4Dos.

With the few ISO images I tried, Unetbootin was unsuccessful – Bitdefender live CD (based on Knoppix), Untangle installation CD and Trinity Rescue Kit live CD ISO images did not boot (black screen).

So I moved on to Grub4Dos. I followed the tutorial proposed on http://themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php and all went fine. Well not fully actually: as my USB key had been formatted differently in the past, the Grubinst program could not find the MBR on it for installation. So I used MBRFix at http://www.ambience.sk/fdisk-master-boot-record-windows-linux-lilo-fixmbr.php to wipe the key and recreate a proper MBR and partition.

Following the tutorial I had no problem putting a CD ISO image on the USB key and booting from it.

It worked fine with Untangle installation CD and a DOS custom CD containing common recovy tools. Unfortunately with a few others (Puppy linux, Knoppix) once the boot process started I got an error saying the program could not find its filesystem. Trinity Rescue Kit also wouldn’t But at least it works in some cases, that’s already so many CDs saved and so much hassle avoided !

I’ll keep an eye on other possible options which could support more systems.

Hello world!

yanndesbois — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:05:37 +0000

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