Archive for: March 2007

Engadget was the first to come across my RSS reader with the news that the Nokia N75 may be launching in April. Sounds like the device will be crippled as usual, and you’re better off buying it from Nokia …

In my past life, I did a heck of a lot with Check Point FireWall-1, now called VPN-1 Power or something. I don’t do much with it now except for use their VPN client to access work, but I do spend some of my day job reviewing stuff other people write about it.

One of the things I have to do in order to use my work computer on my home network is to actually allow my work computer to access a couple of things at home: namely my Mac sitting right next to it and my network printer. Unfortunately, the combination of the VPN configuration and the firewall software loaded on the laptop make this a challenge, but not difficult.

One of the things the VPN does is add all these routes to the routing table that essentially override the local routes. Now I can see why an enterprise might want to do that, but if you want to access local resources, then it creates a challenge.

What I was doing to correct this issue was doing all this by hand: looking at the routing table, removing the offending routes, and adding a few others. In smaller environments, the routes are going to always be to the same default IP. The problem with the implementation I am working with is the nexthop for these routes has a habit of being different each time I connect. I needed to look at the routing table manually before doing the surgery on it. The end result was that I could access the machines I needed.

Today, I got the bug to automate all this, so I decided to write a Windows Batch file to accomplish all this. Apparently, this was harder than I thought, but I wrote a batch file that:

Looked at the routing table for a route I know the VPN will set. Fortunately Windows allows you to print only a specific route.
Parse out all the junk that gets printed in addition to the information I wanted. This parsing turned out to be the most difficult, particularly in getting the information out of a FOR loop.
Set routes, which is relatively easy once you have the information.

And FTW, I decided to also add in automatically logging into SecureClient. One batch script logs me in and mucks with the routing table. To find that information, I had to refer to a tome I wrote nearly four years ago. Yes, I know it was published in 2004, but I did a lot of the writing for it in 2002/2003. Damn publisher lead times. Anyway, I looked in a more recent Check Point book (on NGX) that I had lying around and it didn’t even cover SecureClient on the command line. It’s not the first time I found something in my own book that hasn’t made it into other, more recent books, either.

Anyway, I am happy to say it’s all working just fine. I do miss being able to use my SecureClient GUI (enabling CLI mode disables all that stuff), but I like how much easier the entire logging on experience is now. For those who are interested, I am posting my batch job after the break. If you’re interested, click on thru and read my handy work.

This is a rather cool development, not only for people trying to implement peer-2-peer SIP, but for proponents of OpenID. The method Aswath Rao proposes would actually eliminate one of the major issues with most P2p systems–the dreaded …

Some time ago, I had obtained an old iBook thru work. It had Mac OS X 10.3.9 loaded on it. There was a lot of crap on it that wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t entirely convinced the OS install …

Thomas Howe’s post about not going to VON this time around got me thinking. Being that I blog a heck of a lot about VoIP, I am frequently asked by other bloggers if I am going to this or …

Found a few cool things today:

QTAmateur:  This will become my new default media player. It is essentially a “free” version of QuickTime Pro, meaning it has just about all the functionality in QuickTime Pro without having to spend $30 …

Yes, as Andy says, I’m making my way into the big time. I’ve done a few pieces for Web Worker Daily already and I’d like to do more. My latest is an article on 5 Ways to Use …

At least according to the guys at Torrent Freak. This isn’t a surprise, really. When you have a broadband connection and can download CDs in under an hour, or a DVD in a few hours, and you have a

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Sorry, Rich, I disagree with your assertion that Skype is innovating. Certainly, they are doing more than a lot of the PSTN replacement companies, but to me they are bringing a lot of voice 1.0 concepts to the 2.0 …

As I was reading this post about Pat Phelan who was complaining about the usurious roaming charges in Europe, I realized that for a lot of the complaining I do about how crappy the mobile carriers are here in …