We had a prayer and fast today on Sacrifice. Here is a summary of the thoughts:

We’ve had an awesome week this last 7 days at the NSW Kids Camp and following weekend. Seeing 7 people get baptised, seeing 5 people miraculously fill people with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, hearing the comments from people that we seem taller… the light that shone from Moses’ face after he spoke [...]]]>

We’ve had an awesome week this last 7 days at the NSW Kids Camp and following weekend. Seeing 7 people get baptised, seeing 5 people miraculously fill people with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, hearing the comments from people that we seem taller… the light that shone from Moses’ face after he spoke to Jehovah is shining out of us and people are seeing it just as we are seeing him “confirm his Word with signs following”.

Let’s get up on a hill and let that light shine!

I had an issue using PuTTY (free Windows SSH client) this afternoon when trying to login to a work server. The error message seemed very odd:

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 [...]]]>

I had an issue using PuTTY (free Windows SSH client) this afternoon when trying to login to a work server. The error message seemed very odd:

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.

You can read my final thoughts at Final Thoughts from Andrew. Truly a fantastic thing to have done.

This is a copy of the email I sent out to everyone about the Rickshaw Run.

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 a copy of the email I sent out to everyone about the Rickshaw Run.

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

I’ve just put up a new tutorial (strangely enough about the title)! You can read it here.

I’ve been playing with Windows Deployment Services for rolling out Windows 7 Professional (from Server 2008 R2) over the last couple of days. Aside from a missing NIC driver everything seems to be fairly straight forward.

Plenty of documentation already exists on this subject, but I spent the good part of a day wading through [...]]]>

I’ve been playing with Windows Deployment Services for rolling out Windows 7 Professional (from Server 2008 R2) over the last couple of days. Aside from a missing NIC driver everything seems to be fairly straight forward.

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.

If you don’t already know I am 1/6 of a team of adventurers setting off in the Rickshaw Run 2010 Winter Edition. It’s going to be a crazy (my style crazy) trip and I can’t wait to get on that Rickshaw. We’ve put together a little bit of a team website at http://andrewbevitt.com/rickshawrun [...]]]>

If you don’t already know I am 1/6 of a team of adventurers setting off in the Rickshaw Run 2010 Winter Edition. It’s going to be a crazy (my style crazy) trip and I can’t wait to get on that Rickshaw. We’ve put together a little bit of a team website at http://andrewbevitt.com/rickshawrun so that all the world can follow along in our shenanigans.

As I said. It’s a shamless plug.

I’ve been a little lax in properly reading my RSS feeds of late. But this article on Australia being 11th in broadband penetration caught my eye before I used the magic mark all as read.

While I am entirely hesitant to truly believe what is said in this article: 1) because it seems deliberately [...]]]>

I’ve been a little lax in properly reading my RSS feeds of late. But this article on Australia being 11th in broadband penetration caught my eye before I used the magic mark all as read.

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.

I really like pfsense it makes a really good firewall, router, vpn connector – alone or together. The web interface is intuitive and the first-run wizard “just works”. I am using it to run an OpenVPN VPN.

OpenVPN comes with a feature called “TLS Auth”: which basically uses TLS to encrypt the SSL [...]]]>

I really like pfsense it makes a really good firewall, router, vpn connector – alone or together. The web interface is intuitive and the first-run wizard “just works”. I am using it to run an OpenVPN VPN.

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.