The thing that scares me most about server upgrades is the mail server… the thought of having to reconfigure the many interdependent servers and processes involved is horrible.
So I wasn’t pleased to find my postfix-dovecot installation dying on upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10. I couldn’t sent outgoing mail or receive inbound.
Fortunately I wasn’t an “early upgrader”… both issues were easy to find and fix.
It’s now easy to set up your own cheap VPN virtual private server that can be used with your mobile devices. Great for accessing resources on private networks, browsing securely, or accessing blocked sites.
This is now much easier than it used to be. Last time I tried to set up a VPN on an Ubuntu server, I had trouble with reconnections and had to manually compile OpenSwan. These all seem to be fixed.
Instructions are already all over the internet, but there are a few extra steps for a default Ubuntu linode in order to get routing to work.
These instructions are tested with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), but should also work on 11.10. We will set up an OpenSwan IPSec server with l2tp encryption provided by xl2tpd.