MrKernel Network

I have two internet connections coming into my place, and I thought it would be fun to extend my VPN to my friends place to two tunnels with BGP. Our setup looks something like this:

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Click more to see some screenshots of the OCPE.

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I got a hold of a few OCPE devices. Both the Polycom CX700 http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/voice/desktop/cx/communicator_cx700.html and the LG-Nortel 8540 http://www.nortel.com/8540. As anyone who has tried to connect them to Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 knows, the first thing you must do is get the CA certificate on the phones. Being that they are RTM firmware the official ways of doing this are http://blogs.technet.com/jenstr/archive/2007/11/17/how-to-make-the-root-ca-certificate-available-for-office-communicator-2007-phone-edition.aspx. This works fairly slick except, in my experience, when the phone is not on the same subnet of a domain controller. When the OCPE is factory defaults and on different subnet from a domain controller it is unable to download the certificate. The error I get is “Cannot download certificate because domain is not accessible.”

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I installed exchange 12 over the weekend again. 3 times actualy. Almost everything I wanted working except for Outlook 2007 Unified Messaging plug in. I don’t know why I couldn’t get it to work, maybe it is not included in Office 2007 Beta 2. But I was able to call into Exchange and Call out using the webmail interface. However I just watched the following video [http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/05/24/427788.aspx] And it looks like they have a lot more fuctionality, stability and completeness in there current build. Which makes me excited about Exchange 2007 Beta 2. So, I have decided to not expend my efforts with the CTP and wait for Beta 2 before diving in furthur. One thing that would be nice is UDP support in the sip stack.

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IPSec in Linux/Unix distrabutions have made great strides in there IPSec implementations. It is now relativly easy to create an IPSec tunnel between two boxes of the same type. For example, [http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1859?ref=rss]. But, interoperbility between platforms still requires the user to whild dark the dark magic of IPSec. OpenBSD has a very nice IPSec implementation.Read more for sample config files for a OpenBSD to Linux tunnel

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On Friday I installed Vista Beta 2 on my work laptop. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play with it yet, but my favorite feature right now is the windows+tab feature. It is cool. It is basicly a variant of alt+tab, except in 3Dish. I am actualy impressed so far with the new operating system. I am sure it will definatly be worth the upgrade. We have SA with our microsoft licensing agreement so we are allready ready to go. Are you?

Today just before I left work I downloaded and installed Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2. I got it through my MSDN Subscription. Allthought I only played with it for all of two minutes, it has a definate Wow factor. Maybe I will post some screen shots of it tomorrow. But, I just wanted to say it is deffantly worth checking out. Also released is Groove, OneNote, and Sharepoint 2007. Microsoft has some pretty cool products coming out. I am interested to see what/if Outlook 2007 Beta 2 has for Unified Messaging support. Maybe I will now resorect my Exchange 12 box.

You know what realy bugs me? I was browsing Google video today and I clicked on a video I thought might be interested and, “Sorry, the video you requested is not avalible to your country”. Why? All, I think, it was is a video of people doing stupid stuff like they always do on Google. “We can’t let those Canadians see this prank, they might lean from is and do one on one of our American citizens!” This is not the first time Google has blocked videos from me. When they first released TV episodes, same thing. I haven’t tried since. But, it’s not like we don’t get some of the same stations as the US does.

and here is a link of some who feels simularly [http://www.netsyd.com/comment.php?comment.news.12].

Here is my first training video. It shows how to use IPSec to encrypt telnet traffic between my workstation and my exchange server.

[http://www.mrkernel.net/videos/ipsec_telnet.wmv]

I will hopfully have better quality ones down the road. One thing I wanted to do in the video include using Ethereal to prove packets were encrypted.

There are three ways I manage my systems, MMC (Microsoft Managment Console), RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), and telnet/ssh (Um, please tell me you at least know what one of them is).

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