Ians Ramblings

If you want to connect to your corporations VPN and they have given you a PCF file, which is usually used to connect using Cisco’s VPN client, you can convert it for use on Linux without needing to install the Cisco client.

I use “vpnc” I followed the following steps in order to convert the PCF files I was given into conf files which can be used with vpnc.

yum install vpnc
yum install libgpg-error-devel
yum install libgcrypt-devel
yum install gcc

wget http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/pcf2vpnc
wget http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/soft/cisco-decrypt.c

chmod u+x pcf2vpnc
gcc -Wall -o cisco-decrypt cisco-decrypt.c $(libgcrypt-config --libs --cflags)

mv cisco-decrypt /usr/local/bin
mv pcf2vpnc /usr/local/bin/

Once you have completed these steps, move to the directory where you have downloaded your PCF file and execute the following.

pcf2vpnc mycompany.pcf > mycompany.conf

Then copy the new conf file into /etc/vpnc/ and remember what you called it.

It’s likely you will need to open the conf file and change your username which will be a line beginning with Xauth username.

When you are ready you can run the following to launch the VPN connection

vpnc --dpd-idle 0 mycompany

Note the network to connect to is denoted by the name of the conf file. The –dpd-idle 0 directive ensures that the client doesn’t auto disconnect after x minutes of inactivity (which it seems to incorrectly detect). When you are finished run the following to disconnect.

vpnc-disconnect

I believe installing Chrome on Centos 5 was a bit of a nightmare, there are a few posts around that seem to assume the same will be true for CentOS 6, but luckily it’s not!

I am running 64 bit CentOS 6.2 with Kernel 2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64 I went to the following URL and clicked the Don’t see a window? ”click here”.

http://www.google.de/chrome/

Once the rpm was downloaded, I su’d to root and ran rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm and that was it, it appeared in the internet section of the menu system and works as expected.

If you want to install skype on 64 bit CentOS 6 follow these instructions: -

yum install glibc.i686 alsa-lib.i686 libXv.i686 \
  libXScrnSaver.i686 libSM.i686 libXi.i686 libXrender.i686 \
  libXrandr.i686 freetype.i686 fontconfig.i686 zlib.i686 \
  glib2.i686 libstdc++.i686

Install to /opt (change location as required)

cd /tmp
wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-static
cd /opt
tar xjvf /tmp/skype_static-2.2.0.35.tar.bz2
ln -s skype_static-2.2.0.35 skype

Change the version to match the one that was downloaded. Then create the following symbolic links.

ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype
ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype

For more information please read the CentOS help page.

To install on CentOS 5 follow the above but use the following tarball and substitute it’s name into the instructions: -

http://download.skype.com/linux/skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2

I had a few problems with conflicts between packages installed from the epel repository and the rpmforge repository and the rpmfusion repository. To get anything new, particularly when it comes to media it seemed I needed to dip into these repositories unfortunately their packages often conflict.

I had a look around and found it was easier to remove the packages I had installed using these repositories using yum remove then just going with the ATRPMS repository.

I added the repository by editing /etc/yum.conf adding the following

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1

I then moved the rpmforge, fusion and epel repos files from yum.repos.d into another directory. Then re-installed vlc and ffmpeg for example and they installed cleanly. Then ran yum update and all the remaining packages updated without conflicts.