After a 6-month struggle in trying to grep the internet looking for an answer in how to get Juniper’s SSL VPN client to work with Gentoo Linux, the fight is finally over.

There is a detailed post on the Gentoo forums about how to setup Juniper on Gentoo.

Some requirements are that you are using sun sdk 1.4, which you have to manually download from sun and install with portage.
The major show-stopper for me was not having the correct Kernel parameter set:

$ grep CONFIG_TUN /usr/src/linux/.config
CONFIG_TUN=y

Make sure you have TUN enabled in the kernel:
Device Drivers —>
Network device support —>
< *> Universal TUN/TAP device driver support

see the link above for my notes and step-by-step instructions.

Every morning, I read through various number of blogs…here a few interesting developments today!

Firefox 2: Client-side storage and a lot more

- A new javascript storage containers, similar to a cookie, but are local to a window, not the entire client. Cookies are sent with every request, this will provide the functionality of having two seperate sessions in two different windows (or tabs). For example, logging into the same site under two different accounts (should they implement storage containers). Working draft

ablog » Clean that input! - Promising open source library for cleaning user input in php. I haven’t looked through the source code yet.

Ok, I’ve been sick and tired of hearing about companies who have lax security policies, and private customer information winding up on some outsider’s laptop, let alone when it gets stolen.

According to Wired, Hotels.com auditor Earnst & Young had a laptop stolen with “personal information including names, addresses and credit card information of about 243,000 Hotels.com customers. It did not include their Social Security numbers.”

There’s a simple solution to this problem, companies handing out their customer’s vital information should either *not* do it, or require that the computers have system level encryption at the harddrive level (before the OS even boots up).

This would require the owner to enter a password before the computer starts to bootup, if not the data on the entire harddrive is encrypted and cannot easily be read by an unauthorized user.

The problem is they think the OS authentication is by some means secure. It isn’t. A thief could easily remove the harddrive, and mount it as read only from another machine, thereby bypassing the operating system authentication. If the harddrive were encrypted at bootup, this would not be so easy to circumvent.