This Geek

I was put in the unfortunate position of needing to reload my IPCop. No problem, I’ll export the backup key, and download the latest backup file to my local machine. This I do, quite easily.

So, I reload the IPCop box, skip the floppy restore option, thinking I’m going to restore it via the web interface, so who cares anyway.

I get to the web interface, access the backup option. First thing I realise - there’s no way to import my saved backup key. Darn. So I try import the dat backup anyway. The interface tells me to bugger off, it can’t decrypt the file. Grrr. So what now?

I ssh to the IPCop box, and checkout the existing backup key. Then I check my saved backup key. My saved one is encrypted. Double darn (Ok, I said something far more nasty really).

Google… can’t find a damn thing. The only references I can find is some people copying their backup.key from an old hard disk to the new one. Whoop te doo. That does NOT help me. So, I download the IPCop source code, peruse a couple of files, and figure out how to decrypt the key.

To make my life easier, I used WinSCP to transfer my encrypted key to the IPCop box, then it’s a simple matter of running:

/usr/bin/openssl enc -a -d -aes256 -salt -pass pass:<yourpasswordhere> -in encrypted.backup.key -out decrypted.backup.key

You obviously need to insert your backup password where it says <yourpasswordhere>. If you forgot it, sorry mate, can’t help you.

Once that’s done, simply copy your decrypted.backup.key to the correct place:

cp decrypted.backup.key /var/ipcop/backup/backup.key

and overwrite the existing file.

Now you can import your saved backup and restore your settings.

Hope this helps someone. :p

EDIT: Whoops. Didn’t realise that the < & > that I inserted originally failed to render cuz the engine thought it was an html tag. Ugh.

Not very many goings on lately. Work is a complete slog. I’m really hating it these days. Mainly because of my incredibly incompetent boss, but I’m not going to go into that now.

October was a very busy month - had something going on almost every weekend, crezzy man, crezzy. First up, I hosted our very first Clan get together. Wooo! Almost 30 people packed in to my house. It was good fun, and great to finally meet the people behind the players. Next time though, I’m going to have a maximum of 10 (or less) people. Things will be a lot less hectic then I think (hope).

The weekend after that was our kids’ nursery school (creche / kindergarten?) concert. They both had to attend 3 performances (of which we (ie, mommy and daddy) only attended the second one), so there was a lot of fetching and carrying going on. Fortunately the venue wasn’t too far from our home.

The following weekend was extra busy, as it was our son’s “graduation” ceremony from creche (he’s attending primary school next year), and also my brother’s wedding. Unfortunately due to the timing of the events, we had to miss the wedding ceremony - although we were there for the reception. It sucked missing the ceremony - but at least I had the opportunity to attend the legal portion of the wedding a few days earlier (long story).

This coming weekend is our first completely “free” weekend. We have no obligations to go anywhere, see anyone etc. And since I managed to get my wife addicted to Battlefield 2142, I guess that’s what we’re going to be doing most of the weekend :p

Honestly, I would prefer to watch movies at the moment - especially if the weather stays overcast and miserable. Not very likely though, I can see the sun streaming in the window on the other side of my office.

I’m not kidding - I’m sitting with 35 movies in my DVD collection that I have not yet seen. Okay, some of them are movies that I have actually seen before (on big screen), but I haven’t necessarily seen the DVD. There’s a couple that I’m definitely NOT going to watch though - mainly the kids movies, but that’s still a very small fraction of the total. :p

Part of the problem is that a lot of the movies that I want to watch I have to keep till after the kids have gone to bed, and I can guarantee you that my wife won’t watch some of them either - like my Exorcist box set that I got recently. I can’t help myself. I love horror movies. :p