VPN L2TP without IPsec: how to share the love beyond the OS limits

Well.. I know that this will be possible using OpenVPN but... I need to deal with users, and you know how limited users are.. Also, PPTP is compromised since some time ago, and the options are turning dark.

But I needed a VPN solution, and fast. At least temporary so I can think about in something else later. So I choose L2TP since is easily to configure in windows and.. you know how "clever" windows users use to be.. :D

Well. after the configuration in my work's pfsense and testing in my windows vm, I need to test on a Mac OS X cause some people in my work have Macbooks.. so I discovered that MacOS (ATM) only accepts out-of-the-box Cisco IPsec, PPTP and L2TP+IPSEC. Apple please...

Well, nothing is lost, just open Terminal.app and do this:

echo "plugin L2TP.ppp" > options

echo "l2tpnoipsec" >> options

sudo mv options /etc/ppp

And voilá, now your mac can connect to a goddamit L2TP without IPsec.

Obs: I don't know how much I can trust in L2TP but...

Source: Pandapow

WCH341 USB Serial Converter for OSX

WCH341 is a quite nice (and cheap) USB adapter (I got one by almost 3USD). Works perfect in Windows and Linux, but for mac it's another story…..

After lots of searches and drivers, I found this guy .

Note: Isn't a driver, it's a software that can connect using your cable, but don't worry, the software is very nice and works perfect.

Also, the developer is a nice guy and answer my mail quite fast when I had a problem with the last version. Thanks Aaron.

Preparing gentoo for building android

That's right, I see lots of documentation for ubuntu and many other distributions and none exactly for gentoo, and seems I like to work with some crossdev, I'll post instructions for preparing your gentoo for that:

First of all, you need some packages (ok, if you already have some of these, you can skip them):

# emerge -pv git gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl wxGTK squashfs-tools curl ncurses zlib schedtool perl-Switch zip unzip

For 64bits systems, you need a little more

# emerge -pv emul-linux-x86-baselibs emul-linux-x86-compat emul-linux-x86-cpplibs

Note: I don' t know if cpplibs are really necessary, but I'll let here.

Make sure you' re using python 2.x instead of 3.x when you're about to compile

# eselect python list

Available Python interpreters:

  [1]   python2.7

  [2]   python3.2 *

# eselect python set 1

Download the repo utility. I'll install in /usr/local/bin, but you can use in ~/bin if you prefer:

# curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > /usr/local/bin/repo

# chmod 777 /usr/local/bin/repo

Now you're able to start syncing the source:

$ mkdir ~/Devel/Android && cd ~/Devel/Android

$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest

$ repo sync

From here you'll know what to do. :)