I’m back at home after a week in Dallas, and I’m in the process of setting up my basic development tools under Linux. At first I thought it’d be easy, but it quickly became so overwhelming that I’ve had to create a text file with all of my to-doos.

The first line in the text file, “VPN connection to work,” is turning into a mess. We have a PPTP VPN at work using hardware firewalls. Xandros, based on the Debian distribution of Linux, doesn’t ship with support for the particular type of VPN encryption we use, MPPE128. If I want to VPN into the office, I have a few options, none of them particularly enjoyable. I can recompile the kernel with MPPE support (thereby losing Xandros’ proprietary enhancements), pick a different flavor of Linux with MPPE support, take a stab at IPsec VPN, or get my SMC Barricade firewall to act as a PPTP VPN client. I’ve struggled with the last one before, and I just spent another twenty minutes on it without any luck.