Installing Cisco VPN on Mandriva 2008

As you are following the standard procedure to install the Cisco VPN client you will come to an instruction which says you must run

./vpn_install

Stop

Have you tried that already and seen errors like

• when you start the vpn service

  cisco_ipsec.ko -1 Invalid module format

• dmesg shows errors like

  $dmesg | grep cisco
  cisco_ipsec: version magic '2.6.22.9-1mdvcustom SMP mod_unload 686 ' should be '2.6.22.9-laptop-1mdv SMP mod_unload 686 '

?

Then you should check that your kernel source version agrees with your kernel version. For example, my kernel version was

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.22.9-laptop-1mdv #1 SMP Thu Sep 27 04:17:10 CEST 2007 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz GNU/Linux

And my kernel source showed:

$ grep "EXTRAVERSION =" /usr/src/linux/Makefile
EXTRAVERSION = .9-1mdvcustom

• 2.6.22.9-laptop-1mdv
• 2.6.22.9-1mdvcustom

This must be fixed before proceeding with vpn installation

$ cd /usr/src/linux
$ sed -i -e"s/EXTRAVERSION = .9-1mdvcustom/EXTRAVERSION = .9-laptop-1mdv/" Makefile
$ make oldconfig
$ make modules_prepare
$ make prepare
$ cd /usr/local/src/vpnclient

We now return you to the main procedure

$ ./vpn_install

Why Ronny?

Sometimes being able to invent real email addresses while offline is worth the few measly currency units for a domain.

The email below is a straight copy and paste from just before I hit "Send".

Well, some names have been changed, obviously.
Have you seen the size of the lads at The Breezes B&B ?

Lovely scenery though. And a huge bay window to sit in and snap away. I'd recommend it if you're on The Ring of Kerry. Especially with the big bay window just across from the fire. We were there in ... probably this time last year, and I would've spent the afternoon in that chair if flowers in the garden hadn't been calling for close-ups. So I guess it was March or April because there was more colour than just daffodils. And just around the corner was one of those "tunnel photos" I love so much. Not quite as good as this one, but home was to the right of this one so I'm not being fair.

Anyway, that's not the real story. The fish in Glenbeigh was the real story of that trip ("We don't serve chips, just fish") but it was the lads in the B&B that finally found the email address this year.

---

Dear breezesbandb@eircom.net,

Please consider yourself blacklisted, for sending unsolicited commercial email to a previously unused email address.

BTW, do you know the Sneem Breezes ? I have some nice photos from when we stayed at their B&B, but I know where they are if they'd like to see them.

Dear info@spamfighter.com,

Are you aware that people are using SPAM to promote your products?

Looked like it was a good product too - helluva lot of awards on the WWW site!

Unfortunately I shall now not be able to download it and see whether it would have stopped the SPAM below. This being gmail it wouldn't've done much good anyway, but such are the sweet little ironies that get us through the day.

Bye now, gotta blog.

--
Alan

On Jan 23, 2008 8:02 AM, breezesbandb@eircom.net wrote:

I use a good spam filter, and you probably do the same.
I have whitelisted you and that means that I will receive all the emails you send to me.
I would appreciate it if you would whitelist my email address: breezesbandb@eircom.net in your spam filter.

If you don't have a spam filter, I can recommend SPAMfighter. It is a highly effective free spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can get the free SPAMfighter here:
http://www.spamfighter.com/Pro

I hope that you will whitelist me, so we can continue to communicate safely via email in the future.

Best regards

breezesbandb@eircom.net

How to not search

While reading Mindware this evening I went to get the bottle of cider for a refill. And in turning to look for it I solved half the "problem" of reaching for it.

Andy Clark makes a persuasive case for the lack of an homunculus in elaborating on the lower level connectedness of perception and action. He argues that we do not necessarily perceive, think, act; but that the action is already part of the perception - the looking at the cider bottle is already part of / makes easier the reaching for it. Hence there is already less need for the "think" in "perceive, think, act".

There is less need to conceive of "a bottle" and "how to reach for it", because looking at it has already solved a lot of that problem, and "reach for it" becomes more of a stock action - always reach forward in the direction you are looking.

So it is also with programming:

We offer our customers support via a web site and email. It is all built on the great roundup system. One of the problems we dealt with a while back was handling "Out Of Office" replies - log them and ignore them.

Lately we've installed a new email system which handles such emails differently - it does not change the subject of the email, just the message. And, naturally, the earlier solution was based just on recognising subject lines. So, I add in a few lines to try recognising such emails by their messages too. Didn't work - my inbox is still full of the things. So I need to delve deeper, specifically I want to find out why roundup is sending me these emails, so

• cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/roundup
• find . -name "*mail*py" -exec grep smtp {} \; -print

And there I was reaching for the cider bottle again, by looking for it. I may not have decided yet what code to write to stop those emails being sent, but when I do decide that, I won't need to decide where.

Of course, looking for the right place in the code is rarely as simple as "cd, find, grep", but as we read through reams of code, trying to understand it, we are not seeking a general understanding of the code. Rather we are specifically sieving out the data structures and algorithms irrelevant to the problem. By the time we get to where the solution wants to be, it is no wonder we have already collected the very tools needed for the fix.

One of the reasons I was looking at copycat was that I appreciated it's "biological plausibilty". And one of the biggest caveats I had about it was the huge disconnect between its Slipnet's "perception" of concepts in a string and the "action" of its codelets on the string. It tends to follow the "perceive, think, act" cycle which is downplayed by what I was reading from Clark.

Slightly related:
How to find the most pythonic implementation of the singleton pattern? Search for not singleton !

Why AI ?

AI is agitatingly interesting.

I just can't get it out of my head, it has such arresting implications, and actual implementations. But still has room for mailing lists full of tomes that start with "I believe ...".

Of course there is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence", because there is no agreed definition of intelligence. Hence poor ol' Deep Blue takes on the champeen o de worl', beats him, and ... is not "intelligent" after all. And many algorithms will suffer the same applied ignominy as it turns out their solutions aren't "intelligent" after all. Like Jane in Michael Jackson's story.

All of which shall continue in the great world out there, but in here I am going to apply insights derived from the field to the more awkwardly immediate problem of PI - programming intelligence.

Why should PI be a more immediate problem than AI ? Because I need it daily, and the tools I have to work with are so fucking primitive. With one or two honourable exceptions, the tools I use for programming, are nothing to do with programming !

Ok, ok, caveats galore again - I do use compilers, and build systems, and debuggers, but for two out of these three I don't use them directly, they happen behind the curtain. And, now that I think of it - I haven't used a debugger in months. Not since I switched to Python.

So I can reasonably repeat - the tools I use for programming know nothing about programming.