We had a lively discussion about OpenVPN and various use cases to have it available for access to a home system. A very quick walkthrough showing how simple it is to create and a few gotchas that you can run into.

You can get additional information on installing it from these resources:

• CentOS 7:  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-setup-and-configure-an-openvpn-server-on-centos-7
• pfSense:  https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/OpenVPN_Remote_Access_Server
• Synology:  https://help.synology.com/dsm/?section=VPNCenter&version=1.2&link=vpn_setup.html
• Ubuntu:  https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/457103-install-and-configure-openvpn-server-on-linux

You might also want to visit the OpenVPM website at openvpn.net There is also a discussion of clients there as well.

The talk we had for April was on using asciinema to provide walk-throughs, training and demos that do not use something like a movie. As a short followup, you can view the embedded asciicast below to get a quick idea of what was we were talking about. This is nothing more than a quick and dirty demo to show that in addition to showing what you get, including things like a vi session, but you can also pause the player and cut and paste directly from the playing file. For anyone that has to show command-line configurations, this could be very valuable. Think about router and gateway configs as one usage case.

Today is Pi Day, assuming we follow month-day dating. Better yet, if we happen to use American style dating, March 3, 2015 becomes 3-14-15. That is as close to 3.1415 as we get for another hundred years.

To celebrate all things geeky, Bruce, Andrea and I met up for a slice of pi(e). There should have been a few more, but the freezing rain may have put the others off. In order to be fair, we may have to celebrate tau day next.

We had a rather small attendance this month, so rather than have the puppet talk, I decided to put it off until March and we had a free-form meeting instead. Some discussion of Wordpress, which linux distros are appropriate for what settings, etc.

We need to have another idea session, so part of the time at the next meeting will reserved to put together a topic list for the rest of the year and see if anyone has a pet project or new technology they wish to give a talk on.

This seems to happen every couple of years.

I keep trying to find a Canadian hosting provider that offers capabilities similar to the one I use in the US and at a similar price point. Every time I find one, it ends up getting bought out. The last one was adequate, but had a number of issues (no shell access for starters) that I had problems with. This time I’m using a VPS from a Montreal provider to see how well it works. The initial tests were quite good, so I have migrated over. As it is a full virtual server as opposed to a chrooted area, I have more control and I’m happy with that.