We’ll be going to shut down Jeanine’s Bank of Ireland account soon. For way too many reasons to name.
But I’ll share a few recent snippets of our recent dealings with them:
“Why would you want to move your account to another branch, you can do everything from any branch.”
“Oh, you want to do (Insert any common banking activity here), you have to do that at the branch your account is held at”
“Sure, this cheque is a Bank of Ireland cheque, it’ll clear in a few hours” – Bank of Irelands definition of “few hours” means anything from 3 hours, to 72 hours.
When I want to do banking, I go to a bank. If I wanted lies, I’d go find a politician.
The next part of this project, is to install OpenVPN. Again, in Debian, this is pretty simple. So make sure you’re logged in as root, and run the following:
apt-get install openvpn
See, I said it was easy. Now there’s a little more of a complex part, where we setup the CA and utilities needed for generating Certificates for the Server and all the Clients.
And those of you with a sense of humour, will read Hayibo’s Election News, and giggle to yourselves at the new Nandos advert. (Those without a sense of humour will be offended, and try to sue Nandos. Or take Militant action, whatever floats your gravy boat)
I’m assuming you’ve already got Debian installed. I’m not going into this, as its been documented all over the place, and isn’t that much of a problem. (And in all honesty, if you struggle with this, you might want to reconsider continueing this project)
The best place to start on this project, is to install MySQL. Since its going to be the database that stores all the data for the VPN’s, its best to have this in place before you start with the rest of it.
I’ve decided to try my hand at creating a Virtual Network service.
The idea is to have a simple web interface where I can add/remove/edit user accounts, Generate Certificates for endpoints and check users usage.
RADIUS is a fantastic AAA (Accounting Authentication And Authorization) protocol, which is used for almost everything ISP related (dial-up, dsl, wimax, wifi hotspots), so it seems only fitting that I use it for this application. It also means I can integrate other things into it, without serious modification (since its a standard). I may even start using it for building my own Hotspot controller for Mikrotik RouterOS based hotspots.
The ex-Minister of Telecommunications in South Africa died last week.
Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, better known as Poison Ivy, was the topic of a few of my rants in the past.
She was really good at stuffing things up, and then starting legal procedures against anyone who tried to fix it. I think she’s the first true example of the “If it aint fixed, don’t fix it, sleep instead” mindset.
Government released their own tribute to her, which ignores all her failings.
So it was left to some more objective people to come up with a fitting tribute.
