Frazier Blog

On September 20th I leave for college at University of Oregon. Because my family is not nearly as tech savy as me and needs tech support on almost a daily basis I decided to setup up a VPN (Virtual Private Networking). This way I can manage my computers at home from the comfort of my small dorm room and see what they see. It also gives me the advantage of being able to back up my files to my home computers.

I did not need anything super fancy so I went with the Linksys BEFSX41. This router supports 2 tunnels. 1 more then I need. I opened it up and tried to get on the Internet. The router showed it was pulling an IP from Comcast but none of my computers could get online although they could get to the router access page. Almost to the point of doing hard reset I had the impluse to uncheck the set MTU button. After applying the settings the net worked. I went on the Linksys homepage to download the latest firmware, which what do you know fixes a bug that causes computers not to get DNS when the MTU setting is enabled.

I set up the VPN but cannot find a good client. I found IPsecuritas, which worked but now has expired because it was a beta. And I could ping the router but not log on. I got the Cisco client from UO and it has not successfully connected. It’s hard to test as I need a different internet connection besides the one at my house.

So the net is working but the VPN is not. If anyone knows how to configure the Cisco VPN client and the BEFSX41 to play nice let me know. Or another nice free VPN utility for OSX like IPsecuritas. Or a way to download a stable univerisal binary of IPsecuritas since the website has gone MIA.

Hoping to get a stable VPN by 9/20/06,
Paul