Posted on

Under Desk Rack Mount Switch

There are not enough network ports in my office. There are ten home runs to my house’s backbone switch.
With all the network enabled devices I’ve built and computers, I’ve maxed these out.

I have this Cisco switch in storage, but it is big and awkward. This kind of switch is meant for a telecom closet with a rack. To solve this, I purchased some cut rack rails and mounted them on 2×4’s that are screwed under the work table. The switch is recessed far enough that the cable’s won’t exceed the depth of the table.

rack mount switch

Posted on

OpenSwan IPSEC L2L with ASA5505

I recently configured a IPSEC site-to-site (L2L in cisco language) with a ClearOS router running OpenSwan against a Cisco ASA5505. The first thing I tried (and did not work) was to add Tim Burgess marketplace add-in “Static IPsec VPN Basic.” Using this add-in the basic configuration was created, but the phase 2 transports do not match the options that Cisco has. I edited the ipsec config in /etc/ipsec.d/ipsec.unmanaged.xxx.conf and added these lines,

pfs=no
ike=aes256-sha1
esp=3des-md5
auth=esp