Have you ever wanted to make cron run a scheduled task on some weird interval like every 29 days? I was faced with that problem just the other day.
I was starting to get annoyed with DynDNS’s nag emails, asking me to either log in and “touch” my WRT54GL router’s host record every 30 days or to upgrade to a paid service that does not require a periodic touch.
Of course, you can create a cron job that calls programs like ez-ipupdate to automate this periodic touching. The problem is, even though cron is quite flexible, it does not support intervals of 29 days. …Continue reading » Stupid Cron Tricks
Soon after posting yesterday’s blog entry, How To: VPN Between RV082 (or RV042) and WRT54GL (or WRT54G), I received a comment from Paul Wouters:
Use dpdaction=restart
btw yout ike/ipsec lifetimes are insanely short. you should not do that. leave them default, and the shortest one of the other device will be used.
Paul, if you’re reading this, thanks for the tips!
I wasn’t sure how I could have missed that useful dpdaction=restart setting so I went back and checked the ipsec.conf man page this morning. Sure enough, the dpdaction=restart setting was missing from the man page. That’s why I missed it! See! I did RTFM!
Anyway, I did some googling to find out more about dpdaction=restart and I came across this Openswan mailing list message, authored by none other than Paul Wouters: …Continue reading » A Virtual Visit from Paul Wouters
Introduction
Using the OpenWrt Linux distribution, you can configure a LinkSys WRT54G (also WRT54GS and WRT54GL) router as an IPSec VPN endpoint. This IPSec VPN functionality is provided by an Openswan package that was built specifically for OpenWrt.
In this How To, I will show you how to create a VPN between a LinkSys WRT54GL and a LinkSys RV082 (RV042 could be used also). …Continue reading » How To: VPN Between RV082 (or RV042) and WRT54GL (or WRT54G)
Like most home internet users, I have a dynamic IP address and I use Dyndns to map it to a static host name so that I can remotely access my router (and computers behind it) without having to know its current IP address.
My router is a LinkSys WRT54G, which is running the OpenWrt custom firmware. OpenWrt comes with a package called ez-ipupdate, which can be configured to automatically update your Dyndns host record whenever the router’s address changes. For detailed instructions, see the DDNSHowTo page in the OpenWrt wiki.
The instructions in OpenWrt’s wiki are pretty good but they don’t deal with the situation where the time between address changes is greater than 30 days. …Continue reading » How to Force ez-ipupdate to Touch Dyndns Record Every Month
