Windows

How to Use Google Apps as a MobileMe or Exchange alternative

November 3, 2009 in Computer, How-To, Network, Software

I already wrote about Google Apps as a mail-hoster for your own domains. Today I’m going to talk about Google Apps for almost everything else you might need for your office or personal organization. I just set up Google Calendar and Google Address book synchronization on my Google Apps account.

Your Gmail account also has the Calendar, Contacts, Sites and Docs features, but you can’t collaborate with other employees or members that good. On the other hand you have many other features like Reader or Picasaweb within one account.

I used to use Funambol for contact synchronization, but with my iPhone or my Mac or anything else but Thunderbird synchronization was very beta like and crashed my Contact database several times. Plus they went commercial a few weeks ago. My self-hosted Calendar also didn’t sync very well with my computers and mobile devices which is why I was looking for a more reliable solution.

And although I don’t really like the Idea of storing personal information like Contacts and Calendars at the servers of a company like Google, the way better synchronization compared to my previous and the other (free) solutions I tried, made me switch to Google Apps for these two tasks. And I really like it!

Google Apps provides Microsoft Exchange and CalDAV functionality, so you can sync your contacts and calendars to almost every client and device you want. Read more…

My Backup Strategy

January 3, 2009 in Computer, Software, Unix

Now that a new year is here I really need to finish some points of my To-Do list! Here we go…
As I said few weeks ago, maybe a little bit delayed, here comes how I backup all my stuff. This post is not a how-to. It’s just a configuration example. If you want a howto use this link. Read more…

How to Windows Live Messenger and Webcam through OpenBSD and PF

December 31, 2008 in Computer, How-To, Security, Software, Unix, Windows

bsd1 Windows Live Messaging is cool! All the others just suck! – At least that’s what almost everyone I know tells me. I mean… it has nice features, but it uses such a complex protocol that I don’t even want to think about security.

During the Christmas time I visited my family and one evening I wanted to talk to a cousine using MSN and my Dell XPS M1530′s Webcam, but HELL this crappy SoHo router I was connecting through made it impossible to get a picture of her on my screen or to send her mine. Back home we wanted to try again… I know it worked before, but it wasn’t reliable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Mhhh…. I set up my OpenBSD 4.2′s PF “firewall” about a year ago:

rdr on $ext_if proto tcp from any      to ($ext_if) port 5190 10.1.16.11
rdr on $ext_if proto tcp from any      to ($ext_if) port 1863 10.1.16.11
rdr on $ext_if proto tcp from any      to ($ext_if) port 6891:6901 10.1.16.11
rdr on $ext_if proto udp from any      to ($ext_if) port 5190 10.1.16.11
rdr on $ext_if proto udp from any      to ($ext_if) port 1863 10.1.16.11
rdr on $ext_if proto udp from any      to ($ext_if) port 6891:6901 10.1.16.11

Actually I thought that’s it (according to portforward.com), but it seems like it isn’t. I then googled around a bit… found a lot of outdated information and then came across a few newer posts which stated that UPNP is important for the full Live Messenger “experience”.

O.K. another short google: MiniUPNPd. Runs on most BSDs and even supports Linux’s iptables. So I downloaded and installed it according to the INSTALL file included in the tarball. In short, just do: make, make install, add rdr-anchor miniupnpd and anchor miniupnpd to your pf.conf, reload pf.conf, setup miniupnpd.conf or start with miniupnpd -i <yourextif> -a <yourinternalip>. That’s it.

To test if it’s working I found http://www.microsoft.com/windows/using/tools/igd/default.mspx (GRML! requires Windows, Internet Explorer and admin privileges) to be pretty useful. The UPNP test passed successfully. Aaaaand… et voilà she could see me and I could see her.

BUT the price of this is decreased security. Any crappy program could now modify my firewall ruleset!!! I am not going to write about UPNP security (just because I am not very familiarly with it), so if you’re curious read this post. But on the other hand, if you already have malware on your computer that wants to open ports in your firewall… you have other problems.

P.S. i know that’s the FreeBSD devil in the upper left, but I haven’t found anything better……..

How to Mount WebDAV Share in Windows Vista

November 16, 2008 in Computer, How-To, Windows

O.K. some of you asked me how to mount the /resticted area in Windows as I mentioned one or two times befor I set up simple step-by-step guide. You know… picture book. I used Windows Vista Home Premium for all examples. Read more…