sshmenu Tool for the admin

Again a blog post maybe interesting for you out there. I have to do quite a bunch of server administration throughout the day and have to connect using ssh many times a day. What gnome lacks here for me is a nice tool where you can manage your connections. I found this tool for me, called sshmenu. Nice tool, you can configure your ssh connection setting also including different profiles gnome-terminal provides. Due to the fact that I was a developer (a developer will always stick to developing) I saw that I had a bunch of connection to configure there but I won’t do that by hand. So I have written a little shell script which reads the server, user and gnome-terminal profile name (you saved your customized profiles with) from a file and generates the .sshmenu config file which is located in your $HOME directory automatically from the list. Here you find the sshmenu generating shell script you have to rename from .sh.txt to .sh only (wordpress does not gulp .sh files) and an example connection list file to test the script with.

Ubuntu MacOSX Look’n Feel

I have done some playing around with my ubuntu and here is the result

Cisco vpnclient with Ubuntu Gutsy

Alternative for Cisco vpnclient – vpnc

I have found a better solution then the one below, follow this link to get (sorry only german) description on how to use vpnc instead of cisco vpnclient. I try to translate this here:

Install the vpnc package, please check yourself what sources you have to enable.

sudo apt-get install vpnc


Now you have to create a file as root in /etc/vpnc, name it like your profile e.g. myvpncprofile.conf! Fill in the information into the file as listed below:

IPSec gateway
IPSec ID
IPSec secret
Xauth username XXXXXXXX
Xauth password YYYYYYYY


Fill in den gateway ip, vpn name for the cisco group password do the following: in your .pcf file you find an entry prefixed enc_grouppwd which contains an encoded group password. Copy it to your clipboard and click this link, there you will get the encoded password in plain text which you the fill into IPSec secret part of the file.

After you have done all this you can use vpnc-connect command:
vpnc-connect /ect/vpnc/yourprofile.conf


to connect to your vpn. I left the Xauth password empty because I have a token and the vpnc asks me for the password. So far so good so simple. DONE. vpnc-disconnect kills the vpn connection which is pushed to the background.

For all who want to use the cisco vpnclient package, follow this instrucktion:

I tried to install vpnclient for cisco vpn connections with the packages out of the known internet sources and did not succeed. I found

this link http://linux-support.hiwi.rz.uni-kon…1.0640.tar.bz2 within the ubuntu forum here . Extract the package, and run ./vpn_install, answer the usual questions and finished. If you have an existing profile import it as mentioned here.

Gnome-Blog is iWeb on Linux

I searched for a corresponding tools for blogging as iweb from apple and was told that gnome-blog does the same. Check gnome site for details. This entry was the first to be done with gnome-blog. See screenshot below.

Ubuntu Max OSX Look And Feel

At http://www.taimila.com/ubuntuosx.php you can find a detailed guide on how to pimp your ubuntu linux to look like mac os x. If you are a fan of linux and mac os look and feel this is the right page to start from.