Hardware database for Linux

A nice website : http://hardware4linux.info/ Whith the provided script, you can upload your hardware information there and quickly rate your experience with it (for each equipment it detected). I just did it for my laptop and will go on with my other machines. It will probably become an interesting database.

Perl : how to monitor a service remotely using sockets

I came to program my first Perl script based on sockets, after setting an IPSEC tunnel.

This tunnel is linking the remote peer and the local peer through an OpenBSD VPN gateway (managed with Isakmp).

The problem is that this connection is limited time, for access right reason. So it is not a 24 hours standard tunnel, but rather an on-demand type connection.

Note that the connection is automatically reseted by the remote peer, by invaliding the cookie of the connection and therefore obliging to renegotiate the VPN tunnel from the beginning : phase 1 of the key exchange.

In one word, the Isakmp service has to be restarted every time we need the tunnel to be up.

Of course, this is not the purpose of Isakmp to have such a mecanism and what is interesting is to start the tunnel from the local peer, every time it needs to do some transfer.

The graph below summarizes the situation :

IPSEC tunnel with OpenBSD as a VPN gateway

That why I came to develop a script that listen on a socket and allow that peer to remotely restart the Isakmp service.