In my company I installed a pretty old Pentium II 266MHz PC with an early beta (1.4.0b3) of IPCOP as a means to separate around 20 PC-style systems (blades and ordinary server) from the company Intranet. This gave me the convenience to have virtually unlimited access to company internal resources without the need to have all servers registered in the company internal DNS. Port forwarding was used to allow access to particular systems within the configuration and with SSH you basically have all the freedom you need. I found this to be a very successful application of IPCOP.

Yesterday, this IPCOP router has been running for exactly one year without any problems. Always, when I thought there might be some networking problems, it always turned out, that the router was not the cause of the problems.

IPCOP is highly recommended piece of software.

The company provides the employees, who have been granted access to the company from remote with Cisco VPN clients, which tunnels a secure VPN connection through the open Internet. Of course, the only really supported client is the Windows version. However a Linux version is provided as well, but without any support. This provided Linux version 4.0.4.B-k9 worked without any problems until I installed the latest 2.6.11.7 Linux kernel. Well, at least I think, that it’s the kernel. Now I’m getting

Initializing the VPN connection.
cvpnd: ../../../GI/GI.cpp:799: uint32 GI_DispatchIPC(\
    IPCStruct*, unsigned int, \
    void*, unsigned  int): Assertion `0' failed.

when I’m trying to open the connection. So I’m back to my old ISDN connection for the time being until I can nudge the IT department to provide a newer VPN client version, which is already available from Cisco judging from the Gentoo Ebuilds for the VPN client. Hopefully, this will fix the situation.

These two books arrived today. They were send from London, England and arrived just 1 short of the announced 14 days it usually takes for the delivery. Very interesting stuff inside judging from the quick skimming through the books. Stuff to read for vacation time.

Für Jara war heute ein Turnwettkampf angesetzt. Insgesamt waren in allen Klassen 72 Mannschaften angetreten. Es hat zwar nicht ganz für das Treppchen gereicht, aber ich finde der fünfte Platz, den Jara mit ihren beiden Mitstreiterinnen herausgeturnt hat, in einer Gruppe von 15 Mannschaften, ist trotzdem ganz hervorragend. Der Wettkampf hat die Zeit von 8:45 bis ca. 14:30 Uhr in Anspruch genommen.

Danach bin ich noch in die Halle, in der heute Judo-Kreisliga stattfand. Birgit und Steffen hatten bereits seit dem frühen Morgen in der Cafeteria und als Tischbesetzung geholfen. Wie ich da ankomme, waren gerade die Wettkämpfe zu Ende und die letzten Siegerehrungen liefen. Dann kam natürlich das, was immer bei solchen Gelegenheiten kommt: Matten abbauen. Als das dann kurz vor 19:00Uhr erledigt war, war ich froh, auf mein Sofa sinken zu können.

Frisch durchgeschwitzt von der erfolgreich bestandenen Prüfung für den orangenen Gürtel zurück. Nicole und Katrin haben erfolgreich ihre Gelbgurt-Prüfung abgelegt und Barbara hat mit mir zusammen jetzt “das Recht und die Pflicht” beim Judo den orangefarbenen Gürtel zu tragen.

Yeah!!!

I’ve just read Jeffrey Zeldman’s review of Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide. Judging from this review, this appears to be just the book for someone like me, who is not a full time web designer, but who occasionally needs to style the private or department website. I still have The Zen of CSS Design on my Amazon wish list and I’ll probably purchase it sometime in the future, but for the moment Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide seemed more interesting to me. And when I popped over to Amazon I even found an offer with about 8 Euro off the list price and immediately ordered it and while I was at it, I also included Spring: A Developer’s Notebook in the order. Spring frequently pops up on the Java oriented blogs I have on my blogroll. Since Spring is also mentioned in Better, Faster, Lighter Java, which I’ve already read, this appeared to be another worthwhile book. This book was 6 Euros off the list price.