Tonight I went to a PLUG meeting and a Northern Utah Perl Mongers (NUPM) meeting before that.

NUPM & PLUG

Jayce^ gave the presentation for the NUPM meeting and his presentation was on the Perl module Class::DBI. I had looked into Class::DBI before, but thought it required giving more control than I was comfortable with to use. But now I’m convinced: I need to start using Class::DBI for everything I do.

The PLUG presentation was by Hans Fugal and it was on VPNs. He talked about IPSEC VPNs like OpenSWAN and Racoon. He also talked briefly about PPTP clients and servers. In the end, however, he spent most of his time talking about the awesome OpenVPN software.

I’ve set up about five VPN links during the last month or so using OpenVPN. Two of those were between Linux systems and Windows systems where the Windows systems were being used by “road warrior“ types of users. There is an awesome Windows port of OpenVPN, so it is pretty easy to get it running on the Windows side as long as it’s Windows 2000 or Windows XP. The only caveat is that OpenVPN prints log messages out to a MS-DOS-style text window — somewhat unattractive.

At the meeting tonight, I learned about the OpenVPN GUI! This looks like it rocks. I’m looking forward to setting it up.

Fedora Core 3

Yep, Fedora Core 3 came out on Monday and by the time I went to bed Monday night, I had it installed on three machines at our house and it was half-way installed on my laptop. I fell asleep with my laptop in the bathtub and woke up to a prompt asking me for disc 2.

I had my wireless network card working under Fedora Core 2. Under Fedora Core 3, it’s not working. From what I can tell, it seems to be an interrupt-related issue having to do with the PCMCIA system. It also seems somewhat related to the sound system. Both PCMCIA and the audio adapter share IRQ 11 and occasionally my sound stops working and I get a message in KDE about a CPU overload. I have to restart artsd to get sound working again. It seems I can force this to happen a lot by putting my wireless NIC in the PCMCIA slot.

When I put the NIC in the slot, the PCMCIA subsystem recognizes the card and loads the airo_cs driver like it’s supposed to. I can use the ifconfig tool to give the ethernet device an IP address and I can use the iwconfig tool to query the wireless extensions. However, I can’t set the ESSID on the card and I can’t associate with any access points. It seems like it almost works.