VPN Connection in Edgy

When I was using Xubuntu Dapper, I was able to set up a PPTP connection to my workplace VPN. Overall it was a pretty easy exercise.

Unfortunately in Xubuntu Edgy, it’s been more troublesome.

I initially installed and ran pptpconfig (as I did for Dapper), which was configured in the same way. However when I tried to make the PPTP connection I was greeted with the unhappy error

Using interface ppp0
pptpconfig: monitoring interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 /dev/pts/1
CHAP authentication succeeded
MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP

In the end I was able to figure this out; by installing the network-manager framework. Unfortunately this requires some amount of GNOME dependencies. The sort of dependecies that I’m quite prepared to pay, especially since most have been already installed for other applications. On lower end machines, this may not the way you want to go.

The packages you need are in both the main and universe repositories; network-manager, network-manager-pptp and network-manager-gnome.

Once you have them installed, simply run nm-applet (if it’s not already running) from the command line, and the applet should appear in the system tray of your panel.

From there it is quite simple to setup the VPN connection.

First click the applet and then VPN connections and Configure VPN.

When the dialog opens, choose to Add a new connection, and follow the prompts.

Next simply enter in the name you wish to call the connection, and the IP address of the VPN.

In the authentication tab, check the Refuse EAP checkbox and then you are done.

To connect to the VPN click on the applet and choose the connection.

Finally enter in the username and password required to make the connection.

If the connection is successful the network-manager applet should have a little lock over it. Then you are away!

Remote Desktop to a Windows Machine in Xubuntu

To my great surprise, delight and somewhat shame, it was very easy to set up a PPTP connection to my work VPN, should I ever feel the strange need to do some work of a weekend.

Now to setting up a remote desktop connection so I can actually use my work PC.

I’m gonna need two packages to do this; rdesktop (the client application) and grdesktop (a GUI frontend for rdesktop)

grdesktop came at a cost, in terms of GNOME dependencies, which isn’t such a big problem for my system, but just worth nothing. If GNOME dependencies are an issue, just install rdesktop. I’ll try to figure out how to use it next.

sudo aptitude install rdesktop grdesktop

We can almost fire up the VPN connection, which I’ve already gone through here, but before that there is an intermediate step that is required.

As it turns out, I did need to set up a route to get things working. The instructions were thankfully very straightforward. You can take one of two approaches (as always); the command line or the GUI. I’ll show both.

Adding the route through the command line is achieved by using the route command, specifying the starting address for the network, the netmask and connection to use. In my case it was somewhat like this

sudo route -add 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev ppp0

Adding the route via the GUI is done by clicking the Routing tab for the connection. Then select the routing style most applicable. In my case I am a Client connecting to a LAN, so Client to LAN is the easy choice.

 

Click Edit Network Routes, then you will be able to enter in the route IP address and the mask bits (netmask).

I now can start the PPTP connection, which should show that the new route is in use.

So now on to the Remote Desktop GUI. After installation a nice little Tux icon appears in the Network menu.

Once opened, all that is left is to correctly identify the local IP address of the computer you wish to take control of, and the username and password to do so.

Some other important settings, that may require some thought, include the size and colours available to the connection.

If everything works out correctly you’ll finally see the Windows desktop of the remote PC.

eTax 2006 and Wine 0.9.23

It’s almost the end of ‘it’s that time of year’ again… tax time. This was my first year doing a tax return as a full-time employee, and was pretty damn frustrating, more than usual. I think I will need to write to the tax office with an ammendment .

Anyway, this year I decided to do my tax return with Xubuntu. The tax office only supplies their eTax program for Windows, but I figured, if this isn’t a good opportunity to use Wine I don’t know what is.

Wine is dead easy to install …

Just backup and edit the apt-get sources list

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_backup
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the Ubuntu specific Wine repository (Dapper of course)

deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main

Then install Wine with your preference of apt-get interface

sudo apt-get install wine

Then configure Wine and install the program (in this case eTax)

winecfg
wine /downloads/etax2006.exe

As it turned out, eTax installed superbly using Wine, and ran without many of the problems you would expect. I was able to create a new tax data file, and load my previous years data, which was handy. There were no problems filling in the information, from a technical point of view, comprehending tax law aside. The only issues I could determine, were the inability to load the help file, and not being able to see a running estimate of my return.

Printing was another problem, but was sorted by using the CUPS-PDF printer.

I’ll wait to see what comes of my ammendment letter, but it looks like a pretty successful tax reutrn using Wine. If not I don’t have very long to sort it out :$

Access Microsoft VPN using PPTP

I think it’s just a little sad that I would even want to attempt this, but here goes.

EDIT: This was for Xubuntu Dapper (6.06), as far as I can tell using pptpconfig (the GUI) will not work to setup and connect to a VPN on Xubuntu Edgy (6.10).

Installing the network-manager applet will.

In very ‘rare’ cases I often connect to my work’s VPN and then connect to my work PC’s using the Windows Remote Desktop function. It’s pretty straightfoward to set up from Windows, but I wanted to do it from Xubuntu, seeing as I seldom ever use Windows these days.

I tried to do this a while ago and had absolutely no luck. Fortunes was smiling on me this time, as it was almost as easy to set things up in Xubuntu as it was Windows.

As it turns out, PPTP support is, and has been for almost a year, part of the Linux kernel. The neccessary PPTP client package is available from the main Ubuntu repository, which is always nice. You could go right ahead and install and configure the PPTP connection using the command line, but I wussed out and installed a GUI for PPTP.

You can grab it by editing your sources.list to include the following repository

# James Cameron’s PPTP GUI
deb http://quozl.netrek.org/pptp/pptpconfig ./

Then you can install the PPTP client and the GUI with,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pptp-linux pptpconfig

Then finally you can run the GUI (as root) with

gksudo pptpconfig &

I used gksudo and ‘&’ so that the process is started without being bound (for lack of a better word) to the terminal it is started from. Alternatively use Alt-F2.

To set up the connection, you will need the IP address of the VPN, and a username and password for connecting. Just enter in the information and click Add.

It also helps to ensure that the user is allowed to make incoming connections to the VPN; this had me scratching my head for days (this before even considering using Xubuntu)

If all goes well you should be able to connect to the server and ping it.

Looking good.

There are other options that you may need; encryption or tunnels, if you want certain traffice to go through certain routes. More than I think I need for this stage, but more detailed instructions are easily found.

So all went according to plan, next step is to remote desktop to my work PC.

Maybe my hard drive is borked after all?

I finally got around to trying to install Xubuntu again.

Man! It was a long and convoluted process. I just have so much data, it became very awkward. I eventually ran out of DVDs, so I partitioned some FAT32 space on my Xubuntu hard drive, to put everything on (using a LiveCD), then reinstall Windows and move the data on those partitions to another FAT32 partition; this time on the Windows drive.

Blast away the old Xubuntu drive, and then reinstall. So far so good. I re-partitioned the Xubuntu hard drive space, using the GParted LiveCD (great stuff), and then chucked in the Xubuntu Alternate CD. Halfway through, all I’m greeted with is a

Debootstrap Warning Warning: Failure when installing base packages … yadiyada

Then I’m left with the only alternative; rebooting.

Second time round I tried the LiveCD Installer (Desktop CD), and was going fine until the same spot. Flicking over to another console I saw the dreaded messages I saw at the beginning of this fiasco.

ata4: translated ATA star/err 0×51/40 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0×3/11/04

Over and over again. What the hell does it mean? Google hasn’t really provided any help. So it’s back to Windows until I work something out, that doesn’t involve buying a new hard drive.

Perhaps another distro or an older release?