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

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.

The easiest way of converting the certificates is using the openssl tool.

For example if you get a certificate in .pfx format you can convert it easy to a format your apache or nginx can use it:

openssl pkcs12 -in inputfile.pfx -out outputfile.txt -nodes

Source:

http://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/apache-ssl-export.htm

Short solution is to delete the logs if they are to big:

sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/asl/*.asl

Here the source from os x daily:

http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/06/speed-up-a-slow-terminal-by-clearing-log-files/

For the ADempiere and iDempiere project I was working together with Redhuan (red1.org) on some Fitnesse test integration to run them automatically. The goal was to have a test suite applied on the current ADempiere code with all migration done to the database.

At the start of the project I defined following steps:

1. Setup Jenkins for doing the tests automatically
2. Code some scripts for creating an up to date database with all migration scripts applied
3. Run all the test triggered by Jenkins

While doing the work I was facing some problems with the process on an headless build server. The tests for the ADempiere client needed some graphical interface to work. To work around this issue I installed a minimal X11 environment and started the Fitnesse test software within this X11 environment. Now when the tests a run the popups can be shown by the code and triggered by Fitnesse.

1. Setup Jenkins

The default installation of Jenkins was done by me some time ago and the Jenkins is already running some build processes for the iDempiere project to build the OSGi based code using Buckminster.

For the testing of the Fitnesse tests we decided to use the 361 code base maintained by Carlos Ruiz from Kenai repository.

To keep things clear I first created the build job to run the build of ADempiere with the ant task.

This is quite straight forward and no magic. Just let the Ant plugin call the complete target and go for it.

2. The up to date database script

To recreate a fully updated database I created a short collection of commands within a shell script which looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
#This script installes fresh ADempeire Postgres database
#Author Dominik Zajac
#Date: 10-13-2011
#Version: 0.0.1

WORKSPACE=/var/lib/jenkins/jobs/ADempiere361-Kenai/workspace/
SCRIPTHOME=/opt/adempiere_database_tool
#Remove existing database
/usr/bin/dropdb -U adempiere adempiere
echo "Old Database removed";

#Import new fresh database
/usr/bin/createdb -U adempiere adempiere
echo "Database created";
/usr/bin/psql -U adempiere adempiere < $SCRIPTHOME/adempiere.dump
echo "Database imported";

#Apply migration scripts
$WORKSPACE/migration/migrate_postgresql.sh \
$WORKSPACE/migration/360lts.010-release commit \
|psql -U adempiere -d adempiere

echo "Migration scripts applied"

What the script does is quite clear. It loads a default database and applies all necessary migrations scripts to it to have a fully prepared database for testing.

 3. Run all the Fitnesse test triggered by Jenkins

This two tasks within that build job are the main effort from Redhuan D. Oon and me. Red1 consolidated all the Fitnesse tests to one project so it was more easy to integrate it into the build server and run it. I created the sql database script which is very very basic and just runs commands step by step for database setup. The part for Fitnesse in Jenkins is starting a new instance of Fitnesse each time the tests are called and executes the tests within this instance. The results will be written to the fitnesse-restults.xml.

Jenkins takes care of the job to look if there are new changes in the repository every minute and reruns the job if there where some commits.

The next tasks would be:

• migrate this testing stuff to iDempiere OSGi platform
• write some presentation layer for the xml result file
• implement a second instance for manual testing by some interested users