James Gosling’s Blog

Your Mac OS X has all the capabilities built-in to setup a secure VPN:

• racoon (ipsec)
• vpnd (l2tp/pptp tunnelling)
• pppd (connection)

The only difference to Mac OS X Server is that there’s no GUI for a simple configuration.

VPN Server Set-up

There’s where iVPN comes handy.
It’s straight forward to use and self-explaining. iVPN maintains a valid configuration file for vpnd (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.RemoteAccessServers.plist) and takes care of your chap.secrets and user.plist (both in /etc/ppp).
Versions above 2.4 cost something — but you can use the old 2.4 release (Download here)
because you only need it for the initial set-up.

The only thing to do after you created your config with iVPN 2.4 is to chmod 600 /etc/ppp/* to protect the plain text passwords.

To start your vpn, you can use either iVPN or simply call vpnd from your terminal.

Client Set-up

Now configure your iPhone to use L2TP/IPsec and run a local test on your wireless LAN. Use the same values like before… Works? Good, then proceed.

Netopia Router/Firewall/NAT Config

Put your netopia to ‘expert mode’. Goto configuration->NAT/Games.

The Netopia box needs to have the following ports forwarded to your VPN server:

Netopia Port Forwards

“L2TP” is a manual UDP Port 4500 forward
“L2TP Traffic” is a manual UDP Port 1701 forward

Now configure your iPhone to use your public IP address and try to connect.

On your VPN server you should see all activity in the log file /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log

I’ve chosen to use L2TP/IPsec because it is more secure.
PPTP is basically supported as well, but I did not get it to run and I didn’t want to spend more time on this.

TechCrunch has a good post with some more facts.

(via TechCrunch)

(via Global Nerdy)

Despite the fact that facebook directly competes OpenId with it’s facebook connect product, they’re even going a step further than most of the other sites featuring OpenId logins.
Facebook seems to become not only an issuing party (make your accounts compatible with OpenId) but also a relying party (accept login credentials from other OpenId sites).

Hopefully this will help OpenId to increase popularity…

(via TechCrunch)

I’m not sure if this will make my life easier or even more complicated… (I have to deal with IBM Websphere, Sun Solaris and Oracle DBMS)

The problem was that when adding the webDAV-wagon to your build as an extension, you also get the commons-httpclient dependency to the maven runtime classpath. This wouldn’t be too bad, but the 1.0-beta2 version of the webDAV-wagon depends on commons-httpclient version 2.0.2. That’s way too old for canoo webtest and is also deprecated for almost a year now.

I found out that starting with maven 2.0.9 you don’t need to have an explicit reference to the webDAV-wagon as extension anymore.

E voilà! Suddenly it worked. Maven 2.0.9 also seems to work with version 3.1 of commons-httpclient, the same version canoo webtest depends on.

So, if you get a ‘NoSuchMethodFound’ for HttpConnectionManager.getParams() first check if you’re using the webDAV-wagon extension first.

Why do I think about work right now?