OpenVPN over IP Tunnel

In order to let our office to access the private network of our servers in IDC, I set up an OpenVPN server on 1.1.1.1, which is a server in IDC, and set up an OpenVPN client on 2.2.2.2, which is a server configured in DMZ of our office network, like this:

IDC private network--OpenVPN server(1.1.1.1)--OpenVPN client(2.2.2.2)--Office private network

But the OpenVPN connection auto-restarted very often:

Tue Nov 6 10:47:49 2012 Preserving previous TUN/TAP instance: tun1
Tue Nov 6 10:47:49 2012 Initialization Sequence Completed
Tue Nov 6 10:50:27 2012 [server] Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart), restarting
Tue Nov 6 10:50:27 2012 TCP/UDP: Closing socket
Tue Nov 6 10:50:27 2012 SIGUSR1[soft,ping-restart] received, process restarting
Tue Nov 6 10:50:27 2012 Restart pause, 2 second(s)

The connection speed never exceeded  5 Mbps (our office's bandwidth is 100 Mbps).

The connection always stalled during the first MB of a file transfer.

I googled for a long time, tried every possible fix of this problem: changed MTU size, upgraded OpenVPN software, modified the configuration of the core switch.  No use at all.  I doubted that it is the internet connection of our office that causes the problem.

OpenVPN: ldap_parse_sasl_bind_result: Assertion failed.

My OpenVPN server crashes occasionally, with the following messages in log file:

openvpn: ../../../libraries/libldap/sasl.c:262: ldap_parse_sasl_bind_result: Assertion `res != ((void *)0)' failed.

This occurs if openvpn uses auth-ldap but can not bind to the LDAP server.  It's a bug of openvpn-auth-ldap.

To fix it, open auth-ldap-2.0.3/src/LFLDAPConnection.m, change `== -1' to `<= 0' at line 462:

if (ldap_result(ldapConn, msgid, 1, &timeout, &res) <= 0) {

and recompile the package.

See the following link for more information:

http://code.google.com/p/openvpn-auth-ldap/issues/detail?id=11

Android ICS L2TP/IPSec `malformed payload in packet' error

When you try to connect to an OpenSWAN L2TP/IPSec PSK using an android device of version 4.0.x (Ice Cream Sandwich), you may get the following repeated errors:

Nov 7 15:13:42 vpnserver pluto[20906]: packet from 200.143.118.22:500: next payload type of ISAKMP Message has an unknown value: 133
Nov 7 15:13:42 vpnserver pluto[20906]: | payload malformed after IV
Nov 7 15:13:42 vpnserver pluto[20906]: |
Nov 7 15:13:42 vpnserver pluto[20906]: packet from 200.143.118.22:500: sending notification PAYLOAD_MALFORMED to 200.143.118.22:500

and will get a connection timeout.  That is because of a bug in ICS.  Android ICS seems to mess up the payload which causes this error: byte 7 of ISAKMP NAT-OA Payload must be zero, but is not (see rfc 3947).

There has been a bug report about this.  It should have been fixed in Android 4.1.x.   For 4.0.x (ICS) device, fortunately, there is an OpenSWAN workaround available at:

http://people.redhat.com/pwouters/osw/openswan-2.6.38-android-ics-natoa.patch

To resolve your issue, download this patch and recompile your openswan.  If you compile openswan from SRPMS, make sure to change openswan.spec, add `-DSUPPORT_BROKEN_ANDROID_ICS' to make option `USERCOMPILE' in your openswan.spec, like this:

%{__make} \
USERCOMPILE="-g %{optflags} -fPIE -pie -DSUPPORT_BROKEN_ANDROID_ICS" \
......

Using `cvsd' to setup cvs pserver

CVS was designed to use `xinetd' to startup service. But now most Linux distributions do not install xinetd by default, and configuration of CVS is somewhat complicated. `cvsd' is a wrapper program for CVS in pserver mode, it can startup CVS as a standalone daemon, under a special uid/gid in a chroot jail. It is relatively easy to use cvsd and its configuration file to setup CVS repositories.

In this article, I will describe how to setup a cvs pserver step by step.

1. Installation of cvsd package

For RPM-based distributions, you may download precompiled RPMS from this site:

cvsd-1.0.14-1.i386.rpm
cvsd-1.0.14-1.src.rpm (source)

For other distributions, you may download source tarball here, compile and install it yourself.

Setup of VSFTPD - another approach

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories.

In my last article, I described how to setup VSFTPD virtual users. In this article, I will describe another approach to setup VSFTPD, it needs real users on the system.

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command

# yum install vsftpd

For Debian and Ubuntu,

# apt-get install vsftpd

Setup of VSFTPD virtual users

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories. This article describes how you can do that easily.
(See also: Setup of VSFTPD virtual users - another approach)

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command

# yum install vsftpd

For Debian and Ubuntu,

# apt-get install vsftpd