I’ve recently been tasked on implementing a linux vpn client for our IPSEC/L2TP based vpn. This task would have been extremely difficult if not for the efforts of Jacco de Leeuw (for his “Using Linux as an L2TP/IPsec VPN client” documentation) and Scott Myron et al. from Indiana University (“Linux L2TP over IPsec VPN Script for IU”).

Over the past year and a half I’ve had to relocate my office more times than Milton Waddams, so I’ve become accustomed to traveling light. Each move, however, has required me to adapt to a new desktop arrangement since the office furniture isn’t standard between buildings (or certain locations within them). In the most recent move this past week, I lost about a third of my desktop space and quickly realized I had to modify my cramped arrangement somehow.

A Brief Historical Background (Or, Why Linux?)

My father is a computer engineer, so I grew up around several different predominately PC-based computers and have witnessed every stage in the development of Windows. We had a few different Macs sitting around the house as well, which were neat because they were different and easy to use, but all the cool games could only be played on the PCs. I have a vague memory of seeing a weird computer in my father’s office that started up with “OK” written in green on every line, but couldn’t make it work at the time ;-)

I have evolution 2.12.1 installed on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) along with the evolution-exchange plugin on my home desktop and laptop. For some time now, I’ve been unable to figure out why I can connect to exchange with no problems from my desktop, but not from my laptop. All operations using evolution on my laptop would take several minutes, or sometimes it seemed like everything would grind to a halt, leaving evolution completely unusable. I spent some time last night trying to get to the bottom of things, and stumbled across a thread that helped me make some progress. Thanks to joshmachine’s suggestion to start evolution with the E2K_DEBUG environment variable, something like