How to setup a Cisco VPN Client on CentOS 5.3

This blog post deals with VPNC (
http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
) : an alternative to Cisco’s linux version client.  If you happy with cisco’s client and were able to install it successfully then you can skip the rest of the blog. 

Most of the information can be found at original sources
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge
  and
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/vpnc
 

Only issue you might face is installing yum prorities using yum. That is broken in CentOS 5.3 (atleast til I tried). So here are the steps involved. 

1) Install Yum Prorities

Install prorities using rpm instead of yum.

wget
http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.3/os/i386/CentOS/yum-priorities-1.1.16-13.el5.centos.noarch.rpm    

rpm -ivh yum-priorities-1.1.16-13.el5.centos.noarch.rpm

                     
2) Check if plugin is enabled (see
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge
 for details)

nano /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/priorities.conf

3) Update Proirities for repo files

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo

4) Install rpm forge

wget
http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

rpm –import
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

5) Update prority for rpmforge repo file

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

6) Update yum to start using priorirites and rpmforge as source.

yum check-update

7) install VPNC

yum -y install vpnc

Now vpnc is installed.  Follow 
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/vpnc
 to know how to use it.

How to write a simple Shell Script and Run at midnight every day?

Task:   Need to write a unix/linux shell script which moves Files from One Folder to Another Folder once a day (Say at midnight). Also set permissions for newly moved files accordingly.

Step 1:   Write a Shell Script to do moving and set permissions

#!/bin/sh
mv /home/a/* /home/b/
chown nobody:nobody /home/b/*

Here I want to move files from “/home/a/”  to “/home/b”  and set permissions to nobody so that PHP running on Apache can do work on them.  I saved the script as “/home/myscript.sh”

Step 2:   Make the script an Executable

$ chmod +x myscript.sh

Step 3:   Run at mid night  every day by adding to Cron Job

a)  Edit Current Cronjob

$ crontab -e

Then  add your script entry there (works same as VI editor.. use i to go to edit mode). I am actually setting at 11.59 PM..

59 23 * * * /home/myscript.sh

b) Save cron job by exiting (using Shift+zz)

c)  Check to see cron job is set

$ crontab -l

That’s It!