As you maybe know I am a supporter of the tor project and spend some time in the past of writing some howtos to help improving the tor network in a very small way. The idea behind anonymous communication is well known and you can read tons of information about it. Today I just want to blog about this announcement to share the information and maybe inspire someone to help this project.

In this special case you do not need so deep into the code, it mostly is testing pre versions of the Tor-Bundle.

For new people testing software often is a good starting point in getting known to the structure of a project.

Another way helping the Tor network is sharing some bandwith by running a bridge or exit-node. If you are not skilled to do this you still can donate some bugs to the torservers project.

A lot of LED and light art is shown and there is a lot of space to sit down and do some writing or hacking.  The first Image I shot in the early morning while making some walk around the area shows the rocket which is related to the goal to create private hacker space projects over the next years. There is also a lot of work with autonomous quadcopter done by people who are sharing there knowledge and experiences with others.

This shows how many potential the hacker scene has. The sceptic behavior against governmental organizations and the trust in the own open way of doing things makes this community one of the most powerful think tank of human race this centuries. The spirit of sharing knowledge and developing technologic solutions based on open hard and software has become a place of doing things in a different way.

It’s amazing to the people spending hours and hours on projects with often no other direct profit than fun with the technology. Since a few years the German governmental institutions sending some questions to the CCC to ask them for there opinion for example how data should be handled by companies like Facebook or Google which make money out of analyzing private data.

Since the last 1-2 years this community is starting to grow faster but healthy. More people are interested in the tools affecting there lives in such a big way. Searching for a restaurant, planing a trip or connecting with friends has become normal in the internet. Even very private data is shared by the youngest generation of users. For a lot of interested people this is a motivation to have a look behind the HTML/CSS sites or nice looking user interfaces  to see how things are working. And hopefully they start to do it a better or different way and share there information about there improvements.

This generation are the new Fords, Benzes, Edisons or even Einsteins. Don’t believe that things don’t work in a totally different way. Don’t believe in companies who tell you this is not productive or you never will make money out of a solution. Just remind that Google makes it’s money by finding things. Yes they do it in a clever way and with a lot of improvements over the last 10 years. But at the end of the day they started there business with searching databases and crawling the web for you.

Let’s make the world a better place and start getting active. Start working on a project, make your work public and maybe if it’s what you want to make for living start a business, found a company or just have fun with hacking.

Within the next few days I will make some additional posts and share some links to the following topics:

* How and where do I publish my project?
* Why should I make my code, plans or ideas open source?

This information maybe helps you to find your way in getting things done the new way.

The error message said: ROOT MOUNT ERROR

The problem was that the usb stick was to small. You should use a stick > 2GB. Some of the 2GB sticks are working some not. If you have this problem your stick doesn’t.

Because I got quite a lot of response to the article I decided to write this for the people who want to secure all of there traffic not only the web traffic.

The easiest way to do this is to use a VPN connection which will allow you to tunnel all your traffic no matter from which application to a secure endpoint. As I like open source for all of the security stuff I am using OpenVPN to do this job. It’s one of the most popular VPN solutions and based on SSL.

What do we need:

• VPN Server somewhere in the internet
• OpenVPN Client on our machine (Tunnelblick for Mac or OpenVPN Gui for Windows are both free and open source)
• Some time to configure it

In my case the VPN Server is a Linux box but it can be every operating system which can run the OpenVPN server software.

In this tutorial I will not repeat every single step because the documentation of OpenVPN is very good and clear. Just follow the setup process descripted here to get openvpn installed and all necessary certificates created. After you have openvpn starting with the example configuration and your certificates you only need to modify some lines in your server.conf file to route all the traffic trough the openvpn server. If you are running an linux box with iptables (what you should) you need to add some rules to allow the traffic be routed.

Installation:

On CentOS install it via yum:

yum install -y openvpn

the example configuration files and the easy-rsa directory are located here: /usr/share/docs/openvpn-2.2.0/

Copy the easy-rsa directory to /etc/openvpn and make the shell scripts executeable:

cp -a /usr/share/docs/openvpn-2.2.0/easy-rsa /etc/openvpn

chmod +x /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/build* /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/pkitool \
/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/vars /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/clean-all \
/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/revoke-full /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/sign-req \
/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/whichopensslcnf

Now follow the instructions here:

http://www.openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html#install

If you have OpenVPN up and running but you cant establish a connection from your client please check if the configured port is open on your server. If you have a custom iptables script you need to open the port you are using for openvpn for example the default udp port 1194.

We want to have our free and open internet as it is and don’t want to introduce this kinds of laws in this undemocratic way.

Create a new repository file:

vi /etc/yum.repos/nginx.repo

copy the yum repository information into it and save it:

[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

now install nginx:

yum install nginx

If you’re looking for sample configuration files you should have a look at the nginx wiki page wiki.nginx.org there are quite a lot of good examples.

While using it for a machine there was this strange behavior that the session was not working anymore and can’t be reestablished. Reinstalling and configuring the nx server software didn’t fix the problem.

In the end I fixed the problem by removing the .Xauthority files located in the users home directory. There where 3 files named .Xauthority, .Xauthority-c, .Xauthority-l. I removed all of them and the connection worked again.

Maybe some one is running into the same problem and this helps him find his way out. Beside the logging functionality of NX needs some more love by it’s developers.

Would be nice if you join this nice idea and leave some bugs on each thing you enjoy on the internet. This micropayment system is a good thing to give something back to the people who helped you out with a problem or created some nice content you liked to watch.

This tool can be used to convert:

VMX -> OVF

VMX -> OVA

OVF -> VMX

VMX -> vSphere

Or you can deploy a OVF directly to a ESX host. It’s  more powerful than it looks like.

The documentation can be found on the VMware site and it’s short and clear.

Installation:

Download the documentation and the tool from the VMware site: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/

You need a VMware id to have access but the tool itself is free.

After you downloaded the tool you can install it using the installer. The stand alone version 2.1 (which I used) will be located here: /Applications/VMware OVF Tool/

Start a terminal and change to this directory:

cd /Applications/VMware OVF Tool/

Now convert your files like you want. For example:

ovftool vmxs/Fedora.vmx ovfs/Fedora.ova

More examples how the tool can be used are shown by the command

ovftool --help examples

Examples:

ovftool –vService:vDep1=provider_1 /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf
vi://username:pass@localhost/my_datacenter/host/esx01.example.com
(specify a vService dependency)

ovftool -tt=vmx /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf /vms/
(.ovf file to .vmx file. Result files are /vms/my_vapp/my_vapp.[vmx|vmdk])

ovftool /vms/my_vm.vmx /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf
(.vmx file to .ovf file. Result is put in /ovfs/my_vapp.[ovf|vmdk])

ovftool https://my_ovf_server/ovfs/my_vapp.ova /vm/my_vm.vmx
(.ova file to .vmx file)

ovftool /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.ovf file to ESX host using default mappings)

ovftool /ovfs/my_vm.vmx vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.vmx file to ESX host using default mappings)

ovftool http://my_ovf_server/ovfs/my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.ovf file from a web server to ESX host using defaults)

ovftool /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/?ip=10.20.30.40
(.ovf file to vCenter server using managed ESX host ip address)

ovftool vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/my_datacenter?ds=\
[Storage1] foo/foo.vmx c:\ovfs\
(VM on ESX/vCenter server to OVF using datastore location query)

ovftool /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/my_datacenter/host/my_host
(.ovf file to vCenter server using vCenter inventory path)

ovftool vi://username:pass@my_host/my_datacenter/vm/my_vm_folder/my_vm_name \
/ovfs/my_vapp.ovf
(VC/ESX vm to .ovf file)

ovftool /virtualmachines/MyVM.vmx \
~my_vApprun_workspace/
(Imports a .vmx file into a vApprun workspace using default name)

ovftool https://my_ovflib/vm/my_vapp.ovf
(shows summary information about the OVF package [probe mode])

Nice features are:

• Bookmarks
• All sessions in one window
• Quick connection
• Share folders

I will include a more detailed review of this nice tool when I have used it for a while.