Wednesday, October 31, 2007

nginx as a reverse proxy to your web server

I'm experimenting with setting up nginx as a reverse proxy to a web server. The idea is to let nginx handle images, css and forward all php traffic to the regular apache web server.

This is a good article: http://www.guindilla.eu/blog/2006/12/31/deployement-nginx-reverse-proxy-my-network/

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

vpn to a PPTP network from Ubuntu (Feisty 7.04)

I couldn't use the NetworkManager to connect to the vpn. So I used pptpconfig directly for this purpose. Installing this is a little tricky as you have to add a couple of repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list and the information is a bit scattered across the web.

After installation, you may have to meddle with some settings inside pptpconfig so that the handshake between your client and the vpn server succeeds. My steps may not work for you as it depends on how the peer (other side) is configured as well.

These are the steps I took to both install and connect with pptpconfig. (I have Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 kernel version 2.6.20.3)
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I enabled universe and used the following on my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://quozl.linux.org.au/pptp/pptpconfig ./

i removed all others referring to the old repository http://quozl.netrek.org

with that, there were no errors shown on subsequent install steps, and pptpconfig was correctly installed.

these are the install steps:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pptpconfig

I had to meddle a bit with the tunnel settings to get it to connect. Under 'Encryption' tab in pptpconfig, I enabled the following:

Require Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE)
Refuse 128-bit Encryption
Refuse Stateless Encryption
Refuse to Authenticate with EAP

On the 'Routing' tab, I had to add a route (using Edit Network Routes) to the office network. Since it has a 192.168.10.0 address, I used the following:

Network: 192.168.10.0/24
Name: whatever

I could then successfully start and access hosts within the office network.