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Option to NOT save PPTP VPN Password (Ubuntu 11.10)

If you are running Ubuntu 11.10 and are using Network Manager to connect to a PPTP VPN, you may notice that once you enter a password, it is auto-saved for future use. Mysteriously, there isn’t a check box to NOT save the password. If you are connecting to the VPN with a 2-factor authentication system (such as OATH which generates a unique pin-code with each login), you have to manually re-edit the configuration file each time. That’s a huge pain.

Anyway, here is the quick fix. Simply open the VPN configuration script:

nano -w /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/[your_vpn_name]

and change “password-flags=0″ to “password-flags=2″.

That’s it! I googled for several days (literally) until I found this bug report covering the issue. Either I’m a bad Googler (fact), or lots of information isn’t readily available on this topic. I hope this helps someone in need.

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Categories: Linux.

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By Andrei Matei
— January 15, 2012 at 9:21 pm

Installing the HP Cloud CLI on Mac OS X 10.7

Installing the HP Cloud Services CLI is a simple proposition on your Mac as long as you don’t over-think it (like I did the first time). No, you don’t need to worry about getting the latest version of Ruby with RVM or the latest version of the Gem framework on your system. The versions which come with Mac OS X Lion work just fine, even despite the Gem version being a point release behind what’s quoted as required.

OPTIONAL: Before we progress, I strongly encourage you to consider installing Xcode and Homebrew. While both of these are not explicitly needed for getting the CLI up and running, they are extremely helpful in bringing common UNIX tools to your Mac, such as wget, nmap, etc. We’ll be using wget further down in this tutorial.

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Categories: Apple / Mac, Cloud Computing.

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By Andrei Matei
— December 13, 2011 at 1:53 am

Cloud Foundry CLI (VMC) Setup on Debian Squeeze

For the those of you who, like me, are new to Cloud Foundry and Ruby development, deploying your first Cloud Foundry Ruby application via VMC can be unnecessarily frustrating. The trouble stems mostly from sparse information scattered across the Internet and *especially* from incomplete and partially incorrect documentation provided by VMware when you sign up for a Cloud Foundry Beta account.

In this post, we aim accomplish the following things:

  1. Get your system ready with the pre-requisites for the Cloud Foundry CLI
  2. Install VMC (the CLI)
  3. Create and deploy a simple Ruby app
  4. Test and verify

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Categories: Cloud Computing, Linux.

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By Andrei Matei
— December 12, 2011 at 5:46 pm

7 Quick Tweaks for Mac OS X Lion

Lion is a welcome progression in the Mac OS X family. It, however, has changed the way a few things work from Snow Leopard and before, so I’ve compiled seven quick tweaks I like to perform.

1.) Unhide the Library folder for your particular user account:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

2.) Easily install Java SE 6:

java -v

3.) Turn off window-restore when quitting and re-opening apps:
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> General

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Categories: Apple / Mac.

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By Andrei Matei
— September 26, 2011 at 10:06 pm

Deploying Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers via API

Rackspace Hosting released their beta of Cloud Load Balancers today. Since it is an API-only offering for the time being, I thought it might be helpful to create a quick guide covering the deployment and management of Cloud Load Balancers for all the non-programmers out there.

Here is what you’ll need to get started:

Let’s jump right in. We are going to interact with the RESTful API via curl and XML.

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Categories: Cloud Computing.

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By Andrei Matei
— February 24, 2011 at 11:34 pm