The other day I brought the new checkpoint firewall for the new building and tried to get the VPN tunnels up between the satellite offices and failed. At the satellite offices we use IPCop as our firewalls.

I had set up the policies on the IPCop boxes and the corresponding ones on the Checkpoint firewall. When I went to bring up the tunnels I got nothing. There was no traffic going out the Checkpoint unit and I saw nothing on the IPCop boxes. I spent 3 hours on the phone with Checkpoint and got the box reconfigured and started getting errors on the IPCop boxes but still no tunnels. The Checkpoint tech was stumped as was I. I went so far as to blame the new T-1 provider of munging my packets so they would be accepted at the other offices.

So the error I was getting on the IPCop boxes was:

packet from X.X.X.X:500: initial Main Mode message received on X.X.X.X:500 but no connection has been authorized with policy=PSK

Now most of the information on the internet talks about this being a problem with the IPCop box getting a request from a box that it isn’t expecting. Well the policy was set up right on all the boxes. I even took out the checkpoint firewall and replaced it with an IPCop box..same error. So after spending all day and most of the night I headed home.

Around 3am I woke up and started thinking about the issue. In my mind I started going over the list of all the VPNs I had set up at the time and it came to me.

I got up and headed back to the new office. When I got there I made sure that the problem was still happening.

Now I had named the VPN policy on the IPCop boxes 1200Lenox. Well the problem is…you can’t start the name of the policy with a number. So the minute I changed the policy name to l1200lenox the tunnels came right up.

So for all of you who are getting the same error make sure the name of your policy starts with a lette and not a number.

Last night was the August meeting of LOPSA-NJ and before hand Brian Jones and I the Co-Founders of the group sat down to figure out how to increase the meeting attendance.

We both realize that something has to be done to make the group grow. Currently we have 149 subscribers to the lopsanj mailing list, but are only getting about 4 to 15 people showing up at the meetings.

Marketing came up as a way to get the word out about the group, but before we can market the group we have to get good viable consistent topics. This seems to be an issue with all groups I have been talking to in the area. Most of them just keep pushing on there members to come up with topics. Meeting attendance

The other topic that came up last night was we don’t seem to be getting any junior admins or even any Windows admins coming to the meetings. What would bring in those admins? I know more topics geared for Windows or the junior admin. So we are back to topics.

So I ask you the NJ System Administrators what interesting projects are you working on that you want to talk about to the group. What topics do you want to hear about? How do you feel about this group as a whole? Do you feel that this is just a waste of your time? How do you think we could make the meetings better so you would come to meetings?

I was surfing around today and found a great add-on for Firefox if you use Gmail. It’s called Better Gmail. It adds some nice features to Gmail. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps for Domains Gmail as well. The one thing I like that it does is make your labels collapsible when you have labels that have sub labels. It has some other nice features that I haven’t had time to play with yet. The original article I came across about this was on Lifehacker.com.

If you haven’t noticed and you really shouldn’t have. I changed from Movable Type blogging software to the Wordpress blog software. The main reason I changed over was because of the plugin made for Wordpress and the Gallery 2 software. It made it way easier to embed Gallery into Wordpress then into Movable Type. I also like how much easier it is to do maintenance on the blog and there are way more plugins for Wordpress then MT. So if you have any issues please let me know.

Well the new TV season is starting and my DVR is working overtime.  I have found a few new shows that would be interesting and will have to check out.  That’s the beauty of haveing a great piece of equipment like the DVR.  So much easier to use and watch then a VCR.

Other then the new TV season a lot has been going on.  We have hired a new person at work to help me out and to start working on documentation and other stuff.  I had a list of stuff for him to do and he seems to be doing a great job. 

Parents came back from Turkey last weekend after a 3 week trip of the country.  They seemed to have had a good time.  Dad heads to the Cleavland clinic at the end of October for a check up on his heart stuff.

Avery started High School this year and seems to be doing well in the new school.  She also started another year of dance and is taking Jazz and Hip Hop this year.  I am sure she will do great and be one of the best in both her classes. :)

Carolyn is doing great and is out looking for a job.