Unable to open connection to andrewbevitt.com
gethostbyname: unknown error

OR BY IP ADDRESS

Unable to open connection to 220.233.157.156
Network error: Invalid argument

Turns out that it’s a Windows 7 feature. I had the PuTTY executable sitting on my Desktop as part of my domain account so apparently something executed out of $HOMEDIR\* gets limited.

Solution: Copy the executable to a local disk partition.

Hi All,

As most of you know: in January myself and 5 friends will be driving an auto-rickshaw from Pokhara Nepal to Cochin India – a distance of roughly 3000km (equivilent of Sydney to Perth). If you don’t know, this is an auto-rickshaw (aka tuk tuk):

We have two ’shaws between the 6 of us. We have dubbed them:
The Bull-dosa; and
Daal-Lemma

An auto-rickshaw has an average cruising speed of 35km/h so this is going to take some time. And they are, erm, somewhat totally unsuitable for the trip we are taking them on. However we have supreme confidence in their ability to deliver adventure!

On a serious note: The organisers of this event ask teams to fundraise for a few charity/humanitarian causes. This time the total was 1000 pounds (~AU$1800). The charities are Maiti Nepal and MercyCorps in India.

Maiti Nepal exists to offer help, support, protection and rehabilitation to Nepali girls and women who are victims, or have been victims in the past of crimes such as domestic violence, trafficking for flesh trade, child prostitution, child labour and various forms of exploitation and torture.

MercyCorps is a team of 3700 professionals helping turn crisis into opportunity for millions around the world. MercyCorps exists to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.

If you feel like giving a bit please use the donation section of the website. Donations should be made by February 2010 so there is still plenty of time.

Now because everyone has better things to do than read email I’ll let you go.

Remember to checkout our website: http://andrewbevitt.com/rickshawrun/
And for information on the event: http://rickshawrun.theadventurists.com/

We’ll keep the site up-to-date with our progress.

Thank you for your comments of “you’re crazy”!

Andrew

Plenty of documentation already exists on this subject, but I spent the good part of a day wading through it, so here I present a “get you up and running quickly” list of docs:

1. Technet Step-by-Step (for Server 2003)
2. Sysprep Windows 7
3. Better Instructions for Discover Images (i.e. for non-pxe hardware)

Of course this set of articles is meant to just by a quick and dirty start… you’ll have to read deeper if you want definitive instructions on unattended remote installs. But not too much deeper. WindowsNetworking.com has the start of a set of articles on Windows 7 deployment which will probably help you out with that.

This is for as much my reference as anyone else.

As I said. It’s a shamless plug.

While I am entirely hesitant to truly believe what is said in this article: 1) because it seems deliberately vague; and 2) There are no references nor can I find another correlating story. If it is true then my initial response must be: being 11th doesn’t mean it’s good enough. But then one should look a little deeper at the top 10 results: South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are very different, demographically and geographically, from Australia you’re really comparing apples and oranges which, we all know, just doesn’t work.

Compare two metro areas: Sydney and Seoul. I know that Sydney will have worse services at higher prices. Which obliterates the “is good enough” argument. I feel that access should be equivelent – it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. And then to bring it home: Sydney vs Cobar; no points for guessing the outcome there.

All this got me thinking though: I just managed to crack the 3 digit friends size on Facebook (shameless linking). If all we’re generally using our broadband for is socialising: do we need 100Mbps or FTTH? No I don’t think so. And believe me I like my internet(s) to be fast.

That’s apathy though.

To Senator Minchin: it’s not a competition, it’s about having good service for reasonable price, and those stats to be globally equivelent. Let’s pick the technology we should have in place nation wide and implement it.

OpenVPN comes with a feature called “TLS Auth”: which basically uses TLS to encrypt the SSL handshake between client and server. Ok that wasn’t basic: makes saying hello safe. However the pfsense GUI for configuring an OpenVPN server does not, yet, support tls-auth. As documented in the previous link you can add custom configuration options and manually create the file until v1.3 is released.

Here’s the point: The pfsense + openvpn boot scripts will write the OpenVPN configuration files and security certificates to: /var/etc/openvpn_serverX.* (X being the instance number). So for consistency you might be inclined to create your tls-auth file as /var/etc/openvpn_serverX.tls.

DON’T!

The /var/etc folder gets cleared on reboot. Which is a feature of pfsense’s PHP init scripts + in hind sight sensible.

So today’s lesson is: When manually specifying tls-auth support for OpenVPN on pfsense-1.2.X put the tls-auth file in /etc/openvpn_serverX.tls so that it is persistent.

To think that this is even a source of contention is rediculous. The practical requirement, in my opinion, of getting HIGH speed internet(s) is Fiber to the x, FTTN being the most likely for a first build out, which means optical fiber needs to be run to every pit of every exchange. (NB. I refuse to use the word broadband as it is really a description of relative technologies; not a service).

The risks of having hanging cables are many. Downtime from damage is a biggie. But that is entirely irrelevent. Pits can flood shorting out the copper circuits; someone can dig before dialing; etc… and security wise: it’s not like the current copper network is at all protected from someone who knows how to patch a copper pair – having said that optical fiber splicing is arguably harder so that’s a plus for “back to the exchange”.

None of those risks qualify my statement of rediculous though.

We have perfectly functional cabling conduit and other accesses for rolling out FTTN. The position should be they will be used. To all the people involved: Get over the bureaucracy and get something done for once. Conroy/DBCDE: buy back the wholesale stuff from Telstra – that’s the governments penalty for not seperating during the privatisation; Telstra shareholders: set a price for the buy out – consider it a forced buy out or unfriendly takeover if you will but take a spoon of toughen up: other countries privatisation arrangements seperated wholesale and retail from the outset; Telstra was a bubble that is now going to either burst or be popped; and that writing was on the wall from day one.

In summary: there shouldn’t be an option. It’s rediculous.

Now I’m finding that work leads me to implement solutions that, can be bought off the shelf, but often are WAY beyond our budget (like 10 times beyond considerable). I’ve also found that I miss having my Huawei E960 to “hack” – just for fun and because it looks like someone might finally have a working toolchain, maybe.

Which brings everything in full circle: what I wonder is whether I should re-take up some involvment in open source projects, building custom hardware products, etc… I am not overly good at business marketing; I just don’t have the salesman gene. So there is limited fiscal reward. Work needs some of it: but there is danger in having an entirely custom built with no community support product. I believe in open source so contributing back is a good thing in my opinion (i.e. that’s a positive).

Where do I start? Hmmm that question is one that drives me to get out of the technology field all together. Which leaves me thinking that perhaps I need to find project or product that I’m truly passionate about and start on it as opposed to asking an open ended question.

And then sometimes it would be nice to simply preach the gospel and see where life goes.