Life, Gnome and OpenVPN

It’s been quite a while since I posted last, and a lot has been going on. On the life front, I’ve been going through a month-long interview process for a really good job. My first phone interview was about a week or two before Christmas, had another phone interview a few weeks later (on my birthday no less). We scheduled an in-person interview for the following monday and they’ve been in decision mode since. I should find out for sure by the end of the month but, since the job would involve moving at short notice, it’s put a bit of stress on the family.

We’ve been shaking out the last few bugs with our new lab image at work. We are gonna be scrapping the old dual-boot setup in favor of Linux with VMPlayer for other OS’s. If only there was a way to grab the $HOME variable to setup shared folders, I’d be in heaven… ;)

One of the cooler things I’ve done lately was to setup OpenVPN to bridge my vpn’d clients with the wired network. I came across an excellent how-to and was able to follow that almost to the t, but I did have to add the tap devices to my list of trusted devices instead of the bridge. Funny how it’s the little differences in platforms can get ya…

A cool bonus to the bridging setup is multicasting. Setting up mt-daapd and watching all my music appear in Rhythmbox automagically was just damn nice (screenie). I’m using Avahi for my mDNS implementation and can also see my published ssh/sftp hosts in Nautilus…

Gnome released 2.13.5 last week, and I’ve been working on the release for BMG ever since it seems. Several packages have moved to the new GStreamer and still others need the new HAL. That plus new notify stack have kept a pretty steady stream of bugs and fixes (yay!) coming thru our bugtracker. I’ve been trying to keep up, but there’s been quite a bit of involvement from folks on the testing side so I’m still a bit behind. It’s been rather nice tho to have wider testing from folks willing to submit good reports and even quite a few patches. If you’re reading this on the BMG site, please keep those reports coming and I promise I’ll keep plugging along on em… ;)