Categories
Command Line (CLI) Distributions Web Development

What *Nix distro now?

Hi all, long time no write.
The time has come, well, it’s always been here I suppose… that lingering feeling that the distro you’re using is in need of replacement.
I’ve been using Ubuntu Mate for years now, and it’s great. No complaints with it, the issue is one that is known to many of us trying to get as much horsepower as possible from an old laptop.
How old you ask? Well it’s from 2009, and is an HP G60 in very good shape. Over the years I have maxed out the RAM, replaced the spinning disc HD with a Solid State Drive, and have replaced the keyboard and the battery. I’m just trying to get best performance out of it while trying to solve a few other problems/challenges in the process.
So glad you’re still reading this!! OK. Recently at work they have enabled Host Checker on the company’s VPN login stage. This basically means that my previous implementation of a 64-bit OS with some additional 32-bit java libraries added in (from mad-scientist directions) is no longer working. This used to work, and now it does not. Host checker fails because it can’t find program to run java applets or find an Antivirus program.

Isn’t that a kicker? Linux, a more secure operation system (in general) than Microsoft Windows…. is not considered “secure enough”…

I’ve been trying a few things to get it working within the scope of “host checker” and found this Perl script called jvpn but it isn’t working. I’ve done all I can within my own coder skill set to try and root out code issue or lack of java library issue, but there simply are no foolproof ways to make it work, and I feel this approach is simply very very hackish.

I was considering using an older 32-bit OS as an alternative, but in this day and age, that feels like going too far backwards in time. 32 bit?
The promising concepts of 32-bit:

  • The Java libraries will be 32-bit from day 1
  • I can install Java-enabled ESR release of Firefox

I’ve also read that FreeBSD is capable of establishing this connection to Juniper VPN, but I’m not convinced. For a week I tried out installing FreeBSD, and then installing TrueOS on top of it for a graphical environment. I may have done something wrong in that the machine felt slower in performance and the desktop (Lumina environment) just seemed to lack polish and if it’s going to be slow, at least it should look better in my opinion.

Does anyone have an idea on how to properly connect a Linux/BSD computer to a Juniper VPN with host checker enabled? Feel free to leave a comment. Thanks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.