I had been trying different variations of the tutorial found here: http://wiki.debian.org/OpenVPN#TLS-enabled_VPN which led me to much frustration.

I have a cloud server in the US and wanted to connect my DD-WRT router to it for when I’m travelling I can still have access to work related things – like hulu and netflix.

The link above does not work for this. The test VPN works, but I suspect there was something wrong with my iptables configuration. Since I’m not an iptables expert I finally moved on to another tutorial.

I ran across this tutorial: http://dev.shyd.de/2011/02/dockstar-howto-setup-openvpn-debian/

Much kudos to good documentation. It worked!

The tutorial is for a dockstar so there are some minor differences when trying to get it working on a dd-wrt router.

Do everything server related in the tutorial.

Then change the following on the SERVER:
in /etc/openvpn/tun0.conf comment out the following line:
#local 192.168.0.2 #lan ip of the dockstar

You should have used the example firewall script and now have a file called /etc/init.d/firewall.

You will need to run the command: “chmod a+x /etc/init.d/firewall” to make the firewall script executable.

Once you have done that you should be able to start openvpn and the firewall using the commands mentioned in the tutorial:
service openvpn restart
service firewall restart

Now on the DD-WRT router:

The main difference is that you will not be doing ANY terminal typing on your dd-wrt router. In the admin GUI you will go to Services > VPN > and then enable OpenVPN client.

Then your settings should look like the picture below:

Open the client1.crt in a text editor and paste it in Public Client Cert box
Open the ca.crt in a text editor and paste it in the CA Cert box
Open the client1.key in a text editor and paste it in the Private Client Key box.

Click Apply Settings.

Unplug and plug your router back in to give it a hard reboot.

That should be it!

If you do ssh into your router, you should be able to issue the command: “ifconfig” and see that you are not on a 10.8.0.0 network.

If your laptop is connected to your dd-wrt router, you can to go ipchicken.com and you should have the Debian Servers ip address.

The post OpenVPN – Debian Server and DD-WRT client router appeared first on Allebrum.

Here is a screenshot of what I saw when going to bing.com:

I’m out of the country and the first thing I saw was Arabic. I looked around and there was no way to change the language to English, albeit using Google’s Chrome based translation engine.

Not worth my time proceeding.

Sorry Bing, try again.

The post I took the Bing Challenge today…Fail appeared first on Allebrum.

This was the error message that I started receiving all of the sudden when trying to connect my iPhone to my Macbook.

Initially I thought it was because my iPhone is jailbroken and unlocked. I have two iPhones like this. I tried everything. I spent hours looking for a comparable Music App as I could still SSH into the phone and upload music. In the end, I wanted the Music App.

I restarted my computer to no avail.

I finally had the idea to hook my phone up to my old Windows computer. Each phone was quickly recognized by iTunes which made me increasingly angry at my Macbook. Though I was happy to know it was because my phone was jailbroken. I was just going to sync my music from my windows computer but realized I had wiped all the music on that computer long ago.

So I plugged an iPhone back into the Mac to continue my search for a Music app when low and behold, iTunes recognized my phone. Strange. Not sure what the reason for it was (on two different phone nonetheless), but I was back in business.

The post iTunes could not connect to this iPhone appeared first on Allebrum.

My issues with Internet explorer is their failure to comply with W3C standards. I think all web developers should send them a bill for their lost time spent on project to do extra work to get the site working in Internet Explorer.  IE should really be recalled by Microsoft.

Anyway, I wanted to point out something that I run across often. If you are ever unsure if a site is build on ASP (IIS) or PHP, click a few links.  If it is ASP, sooner or later you are bound to come up with some Server Error like this:

Come on guys? What is this? I run into this all the time on ASP websites. Get your act together or use a different language. Stop using Microsoft crap.

This isn’t to poke fun at this particular site. I just happened to run across it today and wanted to start logging the times I see these stupid server errors. There’s just no excuse for it.

The post IIS Whoas appeared first on Allebrum.

On the long term, I would definitely like to make the client side more powerful. Have live time tracking for the micro managers out there. Make the invoices an all-in-one system with download features. Currently it’s a bunch of cross integration which I don’t like. If there are any features you would like to see, let us know.

The post New Site appeared first on Allebrum.