23Apr 2020 by Jim Blaich

Server Maintenance and Upgrades.

computers, Linux
The file server has been running for years without issue.  It still is.  The other day I thought I’d do a disk test on the drives in the raid array. In order to have enough drives in the system I had to add a raid card.  These are the cards found in Dell servers that can be modified to turn on IT mode allowing SATA drives.  When you get them you modify the firmware in DOS of all things, but it is super simple.  And then you buy 1 or 2 cables with 4 SATA ends for the drives.  I say 1 or 2 because there are two ports on the card where you can plug in a 4 port SATA cable enabling 8 total.  With a 2nd card you…
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08Apr 2020 by Jim Blaich

Netgear R8000 VPN travails

Android, Linux, Netgear, Port Forwarding, ports, VLAN, VPN, Windows
Lots of problems using this router for VPN services.  They don't allow accounts and they all use the same cert.  If you have to withdraw a cert from someone you do it for everyone.  Not a good idea. Here's the issue.  VPN was turned on, and configured as default -- using default ports for both TCP and UDP.  Normally you'd use 1194 but this defaults that you use 12973 and 12974 respectively for protocols.  Not sure why.  Why would you need two ports for this when frankly openvpn uses UDP by default? Anyway, nothing we did would make this work.  Multiple checks against settings.  Testing from remote locations with multiple clients.  A sifting of the openvpn configuration files.  Ensuring certificates and keys were in place.  Nothing would work. I attempted…
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