They’ve been framing for a few days now and the progress looks good. It’s very exciting to see your house taking shape like that.
Somehow I’m going to have to get down there more often. I completely missed seeing the first floor come together. The second floor is pretty fun right now ’cause it’s about half done.
The driveway has been poured and the framing materials delivered. The garage looks bigger now that it’s got a concrete floor. The driveway has a nice perfectly gradual slope down to the street. This is something I was really concerned about after taking a closer look at some of my neighbor’s houses, one of which had a driveway which sloped down and then back up. It turns out this is yet another benefit of a west-facing house. In my case the land slopes down to the west so I had a much better chance of a decent driveway.
Sorry the picture isn’t spectacular. It was taken by camera-phone and I wanted to get the rainbow in there rather than just the slabs of concrete.
I’ve been using OpenVPN for just over a year now. It’s excellent. I’m certain that it’s just over a year because all of my certificates expired all at once. What a pain (entirely my own fault). But in any case it was a good opportunity to revisit my configuration and see where it could improve.
First let me describe how my setup works (OpenVPN can work in many other ways). I have a server at my sister’s house which enjoys a 10Mbps fiber connection from iProvo. This server is the hub (uh, switch) of my VPN quite literally. The clients (computers that I manage for my family) all connect to the VPN as though it were just an ethernet switch and the server hands them an address. This works very well for my needs.
Because my certificates had expired I did revisit how I had set up the PKI. Last year I just followed the instructions in the mod_ssl FAQ. This time I used the included easy-rsa scripts. Honestly those were much easier, and they allowed me to create a server certificate that specifies that it’s only valid for server use. This restriction helps prevent a Man-in-the-Middle attack.
Fixing the server certificate also allowed me to connect to the VPN using NetworkManager. This was fun but NM messes with your routing table so that everything goes through the VPN even if your VPN configuration doesn’t specify that it should (well, that’s not entirely true, you can tell it not to — but you shouldn’t have to).
But the most significant change I made was to switch to UDP. I had been using TCP because BYU‘s firewalls disallowed outgoing UDP (perhaps except for DNS), presumably to help prevent propagation of some worm. I knew that TCP has significant overhead and I knew that TCP over TCP has some serious problems but I really had no choice at the time. Luckily for me it seems that they have reconsidered that policy. I was shocked at the difference in performance when using UDP. Files that downloaded over HTTP through the VPN at 200 – 300Kbps before are downloading at 400 – 500Kbps. The connection feels snappier too though I don’t have a latency measurement to back that up.
Here’s my current server.conf:
dev tap
proto udp
ca ca.crt
cert server.crt
key server.key
dh server.dh
server-bridge 192.168.64.254 255.255.255.0 192.168.64.64 192.168.64.128
ifconfig 192.168.64.254 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-pool-persist server.ipp
client-to-client
keepalive 5 60
comp-lzo
persist-key
persist-tun
mute 3
status server.log 5
And my client.conf:
client
proto udp
dev tap
remote host
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca ca.crt
cert client.crt
key client.key
ns-cert-type server
comp-lzo
mute 5
keepalive 5 60
OpenVPN can also be used in a username and password mode. Unfortunately for me the developers decided to disable the ability to read the password from a file by default. I can understand why they might think this was important except that the software will happily read an unencrypted private key from a file. What’s the difference? There isn’t one. At least that’s my take on it. If the file (key or password) is compromised someone can impersonate the client. It’s that simple. I brought it up with the developers but though there was some discussion about side-issues I got no reply on that particular point. In summary — though I’d love to use password authentication instead of certificate authentication I’m not going to recompile the clients just so I can do that.