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These posts are the creation of Doran L. Barton (AKA Fozziliny Moo). To learn more about Doran, check out his website at fozzilinymoo.org.

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Professionally bitter

Posted: 1 March 2004 at 02:33:12

What a frustrating (but still fun) weekend!

Christine’s birthday

Christine’s birthday was Saturday, but I knew Sons Of Nothing had a show scheduled for that day, so I arranged with Christine that we do our birthday celebration on Friday.

For her birthday, I took Christine to see the film The Testaments at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It’s a film about... well, it’s a Mormon church thing.

I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as Legacy — the film the church used to play there — but I really did enjoy the scenery and prop work in the film.

Christine wanted to have lunch at Panda Express, but we couldn’t find one and we didnm’t want to drive to Sandy, South Jordan, or West Jordan where there were locations we knew about. Because our kids were staying with my mom in West Valley, we went to Chinese Gourmet nearby for lunch. It was good.

And speaking of chinese food, I’m finally getting pretty good at figuring out how to eat chinese without pushing my blood-sugar through the roof.

Friday night, our family went to Smiths and bought a german chocolate round birthday cake. As I type this entry two days later, the cake is gone and it has only been eaten by us. :-)

Sons of (Absolutely) Nothing

The big Sons Of Nothing show planned for Saturday night at Club Sound (previously known as Club Bricks, AKA “Salt Lake’s dyke joint a few years back”) was cancelled at the last minute by the club. Nobody’s real sure why.

It may have been because of the weather, but the weather (snow) wasn’t anything like it was on 27 December 2003 when the band played there before and still drew a healthy crowd.

The fact is, Thom knew a lot of people were coming. One of the band members had invited a group from her work to see the band and they had confirmed they were coming. Thom had received e-mail from several people, some of which were traveling from out of state to see the show.

And that’s not all. The band had made arrangements for a fill-in sax player to do the show since John Flanders — the regular reedblower — had other committments that night. And, to top it off, drummer Greg had to bail on the show at the last minute because his wife had a medical emergency and had to be transported to an out-of-state facility and he went with her.

Thom lined up a stand-in (drum-in?) drummer for the show... who had all his gear set up on stage before the cancellation announcement.

I showed up at 6:30 Saturday night with all my gear. The show had just been cancelled. The club manager was distressed. She was taking orders from the club owner and didn’t like any of it.

Thom was distressed because there were members of the band and tech crew who didn’t know either because they hadn’t shown up yet or because they had left to run errands and what-not and hadn’t come back yet. Plus, there was the issue of all these people he knew were planning to come to this show...

I waited around while the drummer quietly packed up his gear and Thom got hold of everyone else who didn’t know about the cancellation. Then I gave Thom a ride home.

Thom was adamant he be professional about the whole situation in order to maintain the band’s local reputation as being easy to work with. He told me he was disappointed but he didn’t want to be bitter. I told him it might be okay to be bitter, but to be professional about it... “Be professionally bitter,” I suggested. Then I said that sounded more like someone who was bitter for a living.

All in all, it sucked.

Eli’s sick

Eli has got something — the doctor says it’s probably RSV. This, of course, strikes fear in mine and Christine’s hearts because Lucy spent nearly a week in the hospital on oxygen with RSV when she was just a couple months old. It’s not a fun thing to deal with.

So far, I’d say Eli’s doing okay. I remember Lucy’s demeanor was kind of catatonic at times when she had it. Eli’s cheerful personality still shines through even though he’s sick. He still laughs when we snort at him and smiles or laughs when he sees his reflection.

I just hope it gets better and not worse.

VPN!

One of our NetGateway clients wants to set up VPN services so that some employees may work from home. Because of the nature of their business, it’s crucial the VPN be secure and encrypted.

Because of this, I’ve chosen OpenSWAN — an open-source IPSEC implementation based on another open-source project called FreeSWAN — along with a L2TP daemon to provide compatibility with Windows VPN clients.

I’ve discovered setting this stuff up on the server is no easy task. In fact, I have yet to successfully do it.

Here’s the set up:

VPN configuration

In order to work with Windows 2000 clients, you have to use a version of OpenSWAN set up to use X.509 certificates. Because our situation involves the remote user sitting behind a firewall doing network address translation (NAT), we also need NAT traversal (NAT-T) code compiled into OpenSWAN.

Finding prebuilt Linux packages of plain vanilla FreeSWAN or OpenSWAN is pretty easy. Even finding some with X.509 support isn’t that hard. But I have yet to find some that has the NAT-T code patched in.

So, I’ve resorted to compiling from source. It hasn’t been fun.

We were hoping to get this all tested and installed this weekend and here it is 2:30 a.m. Monday morning and I still have no VPN.