Sunday, September 16, 2007

vpn client

I had some trouble getting my Cisco VPN client to work with Ubuntu, particularly the new kernel versions 2.6.22 and greater.

From http://www.longren.org/2007/05/17/how-to-cisco-vpn-client-on-ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn/

--------------------

Now Alexander Griesser released a new patch that works with these kernels:

After getting everything setup and running nicely, I realized I had no way of connecting to the Cisco PIX VPN we have at work. This is really important for me to be able to do, my job depends on it. I immediately went to Google and started searching. Turns out a nice fellow named Alexander Griesser has created a patch for the Cisco VPN client. The most recent CIsco VPN client for linux won’t compile with kernels 2.6.19 or newer. There’s really not much of a difference between his instructions and this how-to. However, I’m including more detailed instructions for those who may not be familiar with compiling software on Linux.


Here’s the steps I took to get the Cisco VPN Client to work under Unbutu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). Note: A $ at the beginning of a line signifies a command to be run from the terminal.



  1. Download vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz (mirror) to your home directory.

  2. Open a terminal window and untar the vpnclient with the following command:
    $ tar xzf vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
    This will create a new folder called vpnclient in your home directory. Leave the terminal window open, you’ll need it later.

  3. Download the patch (mirror) and save it to the vpnclient folder that was created in step 2.

  4. Go back to your terminal window and move into the vpnclient folder:
    $ cd vpnclient/

  5. Now patch the Cisco VPN source with this command:
    $ patch < vpnclient-linux-2.6.22.diff

  6. Next we actually build the Cisco VPN client, issue this command:
    $ sudo ./vpn_install
    Just hit enter for everything it asks you, the defaults are all OK. You may see lots of warnings, but those are OK.

  7. The VPN client is installed, now we need to start it:
    $ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start

  8. Place your .pcf configuration files in /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/

  9. If your .pcf file is called myVPN.pcf, you’ll connect to the VPN with the following command:
    $ sudo vpnclient connect myVPN






That’s it! You should now be able to connect to your Cisco VPN with the official Cisco VPN client on Linux. This will probably work on pretty much any linux setup, not just Ubuntu.



UPDATE (8/18/2007):
Alexander Griesser released a new patch that works with kernel versions 2.6.22 and greater. The new patch is backwards compatible, so it also works with older kernels as well, such as 2.6.10 and 2.6.21. All the download links above point to the newest release of the patch. I’ll continue to update this how-to as he releases new patches.



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Monday, September 3, 2007

graphs in Rcommander

So I was happily using R, being a former "Windows client" by means of Rcommander .

I couldn' get a decent abline, so my question to the developer was:

I have data set nura:
> date gtv ctv
> 1 10/05/07 162.75 342.41
> 2 01/06/07 203.36 350
> 3 08/06/07 170.57 364.78
> 4 15/06/07 88.31 285.28
> 5 22/06/07 35.07 251.12
>
> I make a scatterplot with Rcmdr:
> scatterplot(gtv~ctv, reg.line=FALSE, smooth=FALSE, labels=FALSE,
> boxplots=FALSE, span =0.5, data=nura)
>
> Then I wnat to have vertical line at 300, in the script window:
> abline(v=300)
>
> The result is the graph you see in th PDF enclosed.
>
> I get a shift in my x-values. This happens with all my data in Rcmdr,
> but not when I use plain R.
>

The respons was :

This behaviour has to do with scatterplot() in the car package; it's
not peculiar to the Rcmdr. See the explanation of the reset.par
argument in ?scatterplot: You should set reset.par to FALSE.

(I'm only looking now for a solution to keer this reset.par set FALSE by default