Some long time ago I made a call for help to get OpenVPN working on the Android platform. There were two places where work had to be done: porting openvpn and writing a GUI enabling you to start/stop/interact with tunnels.

It took some time but finally someone made the necessary patches to get openvpn running. It was then time for me to get into action and continue the work on a GUI wrapper.

The first releases supported only hardcoded usernames and passwords, but I finally released a new version supporting authentication prompts. If you want to install it simply search for TunnelDroid on the Market.

On the technical part this is how the app is structured:

• Main GUI Intent listing the configurations
• Second Intent to edit the configurations
• Service managing the openvpn binaries and the tunnel-inteligence
• Thread to stop openvpn after a timeout, this is necessary as otherwise openvpn will not stop try connecting
• Thread to interact with openvpn using a network socket and the openvpn management interface
• Intent displaying the connection logfile, logfile can be emailed by a simple click
• Status Bar Notification when the tunnel is up

Of course the code is released as open source and can be found on sourceforge.
Below you can see some screenshots.

Yesterday evening I planned the upgrade of a server I share with a few friends. This server already hosts some bigger sites like Mechelenblogt and Hackerspace.be.
The server ran Ubuntu Jaunty but we needed to upgrade to Karmic because of new features in Apache we wanted.

Suprisingly Ubuntu has a better day to upgrade than the debian apt-get dist-upgrade + change your /etc/apt/sources.list to reflect the new repositories.
You simply need to type do-release-upgrade followed by enter and an interactive upgrade process will do all the work for you.

There were no issues at all with the upgrade. With all the reading and double checking what it did the upgrade took only 50 minutes. Ubuntu++, Linux++, opensource++ is my conclusion.

Did you notice speakers get interviewed before FOSDEM?
Check out these interviews:

• Rob Savoye (Gnash)
• Martin Odersky (Scala)
• Pieter Hintjens (OpenAMQ)
• Victor Stinner (Fusil)
• Simo Sorce (FreeIPA v2)
• Max Spevack (Fedora Project)

More will probably come later...

FOSDEM 2009 is approaching very fast. The dates are set on the 7th - 8th February 2009 with on the 6th the usual beer event.

It's time to start again with the

Austin, Texas, November 19th, 2008 -- The Metasploit Project announced today the free, world-wide availability of version 3.2 of their exploit development and attack framework. The latest version is provided under a true open source software license (BSD) and is backed by a community-based development team.

Zivios in 3 lines

Zivios is a web based control panel which brings together vital open source technologies needed by medium and large enterprises. At it's core, Zivios provides identity management, single sign-on, user, group and computer provisioning, as well as remote management of services.

Check the screenshot and features page for more details.

Installation

The wiki of Zivios contains a manual for the Automated Webbased installation. Don't let yourself be fooled by the word 'automated', the installation is indeed trough a webbased wizard, but before getting that wizard some manual steps are required to handle the dependencies. The manual is very clear about all the steps, it's mainly copy paste and common sense. Once these manual installations (apt-get) have been performed the next steps are web-based.

I got into contact with mhashmi, the guy responsible for the webbased installer. He confirmed that they plan to "have packages for ubuntu, debian and possible the rh family of distros for 0.6.0". That would indeed be better than right now where the webbased wizard compiles loads of stuff. Personally I'm not pro on having a compiler on a production server.

The web interface

Before clicking everywhere a Zivios-novice should read the Getting Started With Zivios tutorial.

Fill in the information correctly as it looks like the current version (0.5.1) has no support for editing the objects you created. You will get the 'not-so-comic' message: "Why didn't you enter everything right the first time?".

While continuing playing around with this software I came across many unimplemented features and quite some bugs (they have been reported of course).

Conclusion

Zivios has a promising future if they implement what they say they will.
But currently it's very far from something usable.

Hi all,

Just a little notice that the first part of the event on open source ERP systems organised by Profoss will take place on 18 november in Brussels.
I have just published interviews of the speakers, which are specialists in Adempiere, Compiere, OpenERP, OpenBravo and ERP deployments.

All details are on http://www.profoss.eu/events

As the event needs promotion, don't hesitate to spread the new around!