Networks

In my ongoing adventures of playing with the Chromebox as a firewall, I eventually found a reason to use stock Ubuntu 16.04 instead of VyOS.

For the most part, devices just work as you’d expect under Ubuntu. Even my USB ethernet network interface (NIC) devices work fine. But I eventually noticed a problem.

By default USB NICs under Ubuntu 16.04 (which uses systemd & udev) are named “enxABCDEF123456” where ABCDEF123456 is the full MAC address of the device.

This is a bit of a follow up from my last post. I’ve still got my Asus Chromebox. I’m not running ESXi any more… but something I do want to try out is VyOS. Why? Well, my original intent when purchasing the Chromebox was to play around with it, but then I really did expect it to replace my home router. I’ve used pfSense for a long time, but I’m curious about VyOS because I know several people using EdgeRouter Lite which uses EdgeOS, a fork of VyOS. So I wanted to play around on existing hardware.

I recently stumbled across the ASUS CHROMEBOX-M004U. It’s a Chromebox, which is cool in its own right, but I was interested in using it’s dual-core Celeron Haswell CPU, expandable RAM (up to 16GB), and M2 Sata storage for other purposes.

First things first, you’ve got to enable the box to run things other than ChromeOS… Thankfully that’s well documented ( http://kodi.wiki/view/ASUS_Chromebox ), so I won’t go into detail at this time. But I will say, I used the standalone, custom coreboot firmware and chose the headless option, as my current planned use cases are for servers. Apparently you want non-headless if you plan to use the box as a Plex Home Theater or Kodi box. Oh, also, I set it to boot first from USB if  available.

There’s one standard document on HOWTO get Network Connect working on Ubuntu Linux. It’s mad scientist’s doc: http://mad-scientist.us/juniper.html . However, there are a few things not covered. I’ll assume that you’ve followed mad scientist’s excellent guide before going any further.

Issue #1: 64-bit Ubuntu

By default, when you install java on your 64-bit system, you get a 64-bit java. No surprise there, right? Well, Juniper’s tools don’t play nice with 64-bit java. If you attempt to start the junipernc script you’ll promptly see the “VPN has failed!” error message.

I have to use VPNs at work. Specifically, to access my production webservers (etc), I have to use a Cisco VPN client. Sadly, the VPN concentrator overrides my choice of allowing local LAN access. So, when I am on the VPN, I have my DNS options changed so I can’t use any local servers. This is a serious, serious pain. So painful in fact, that many times instead of fight with it, I simply would run a Windows session in VMware (on my Mac) and connect the VPN there. This has drawbacks too, but it’s better than not having local network access.