for keeping track of my digital experiments

I was having trouble with some old CD-RW’s that I was installing Debian 5 from the other day, so since the machine’s BIOS supported booting from removable disk (usb), I decided on giving that a try.

Much of this is based on the great article – “Installing Debian Sarge
from a USB memory stick (USB key)“ - by Pascal Le Bail.

You are going to need a decent Internet connection that you can download the extra Debian packages from, and a BIOS that can boot from a usb disk. This assumes that your usb disk is the first that you have connected. Run dmesg to find out the exact dev name of your device if sda is incorrect.

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1
wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cp [netinstall or biz card].iso /mnt/


You can pick up a business card or netinstall cd iso from Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the Internet.

Over the past day or so, I have been doing some update/maintenance work on the I Am Super Rich MySpace application for Solitech GmbH. (You can also find its Facebook counterpart under the name I Am Rich.) I’ve done work on these application before, and have had success in picking up the code really quick, but I now have to transition the MySpace edition over the OpenSocial 0.8 to get the application to post on users’ event feeds. The (now old) 0.8 OpenSocial spec was released sometime in January 2009 on MySpace, and update from the really old 0.7 OpenSocail spec. Along with the 0.8 release on MySpace came the opening of Activity Feed functionality to 3rd party developers.

Here is what is required to get Applications posting to users’ event feeds:

1. your MySpace app must be running in the 0.8 OpenSocial framework
2. MySpace app must make use of the templating engine for Activies
3. MySpace app must not be using old/deprecated 0.7 OpenSocial Javascript. This was a real problem for the IMSR app … had to hunt through several hundred lines of Javascript. Check out this seriously helpful MySpace developer wiki entry on transitioning your app to 0.8.

A bit of googling turned up a great post by on howtoforge.com called, “OpenVPN Server On CentOS 5.2“. I didn’t know quite how to add the rpmforge repo that is needed to install OpenVPN from so … google turned up another handy article how to do that called, “CentOS 5 – install rpmforge yum repo“. I checked the rpmforge RPM releases at http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/ to be sure that this is the latest release … it is (as of June 2009). The following pasties are based off of the aforementioned article with some changes.

yum install openvpn
cd /etc/openvpn/
mkdir easy-rsa
cp -R /usr/share/doc/openvpn-2.0.9/easy-rsa/2.0/* easy-rsa/
chmod -R 777 easy-rsa/
cd easy-rsa/
. ./vars
./clean-all
./build-ca
–> For the common name use “OpenVPN-CA”, of anything else helpfully descriptive. <–
./build-key-server server
–> Enter various customized values if you so please, but be sure to leave the common name value as the default – “server”. Oh, and answer yes to the two questions at the end. <–
./build-key client1
–> Change the number 1 to 2, 3, and so on how ever many client certificates you want. Leave the common name as the default “clientn“. <–
./build-dh
cd keys/
openvpn --genkey --secret ta.key

For more information on transferring the necessary keys to the client, see the final part of a blog post I did on running OpenVPN on Debian.

I created two example config files utilizing the OpenVPN routed tunnel method … hope they help. [server] [client]

Just add the static routes to the VPN subnet(s) to your LAN gateway.

If you need any help I suppose you could always pay me to set this up for you, that’s what I’ve done for some other folks.