Saturday, May 25, 2013

(maybe it's your proxy?) Cisco AnyConnect: Secure VPN connection terminated locally by the client. Reason 403: Unable to contact the secure gateway.

[from 2010, bit me once and stole an hour or two of my time..]
Caution:  technical networking discsussed

From the Cisco AnyConnect vpn software:
Secure VPN connection terminated locally by the client. Reason 403: Unable to contact the secure gateway.

This was from WinXP running in a vm on my Mac.  Worked under two other vm's fine.

I could ping the VPN host fine. This WinXP machine was setup with some port forwarding and squid, because they took away the Mac client for no reason. So, this VM was my gateway (application-level routed..).

I tried rebooting; updated the VMware tools too; I thought this might be the issue. Updated the VMware tools on another machine, it was fine. Checked for any other DTLS (datagram transport layer security--basically, SSL over UDP) vpn clients that might work with Cisco but didn't find any.
I was about to start sniffing the traffic to see what was actually happening at the wire level.

I decided to just uninstall it; after all, it couldn't get more broken that it already was.
Uninstall was successful, so I started a browser to make the SSL connection which automatically downloads and installs the client. Right away, an error in IE: 'Check your Internet connection'.

The proxy! I forgot all about it, and hadn't started it because I didn't have the VPN connection up, and without the VPN, the proxy was of little use... I only use the proxy for tunneling to the one internal network that I access via VPN by use of a pac (proxy auto-config) file.

However, I had set IE in the VM to use the proxy, not for access, but for timing analysis by checking the squid access log. And then I left the configuration in, and got hit when AnyConnect tried to next connect.

I wouldn't expect it to use the proxy, but there is probably an initial connect check that it does over TCP.

keyboard shortcuts: Disable front row (OSX), NetBeans

I use the keyboard far more than mouse..
  • cmd-tab to switch applications
  • cmd-` for windows, Aquamacs buffers
  • ctrl-tab for tabs in browsers, buffers in NetBeans
Occasionally I miss and hit cmd-ESC, which does the worst thing -- stops my music, fades everything to black,
and then brings up the front row icon. Luckily hitting ESC again makes it go away, but it's an annoying interruption. Every time I say "I have to disable that..." and put it off.

No more.

Cmd-space keyboard to access System Preferences.
The shortcuts come up, Front Row is the fourth icon for me;
select, click checkbox on the right,
done!

Now, cmd-ESC is the same as ESC.. I thought there would be a good shortcut to use this for, but I can't think of a better one.

Links:
Any other favorite shortcuts ?
New tools?
Been meaning to look into ubiquity...



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org-mode says: Warning: Bug in outline-mode: it forgets to call `run-mode-hooks'

Warning: Bug in outline-mode: it forgets to call `run-mode-hooks'
I just encountered this error when visiting a .org file and finding I was in outline-mode.
No changes to any of my init files...  M-x org-mode gave the same error.
In aquamacs 2.4, I found that if I opened a remote file using tramp, and then open an org file either locally or remotely, org mode will fail to start.  If I restart the org mode, aquamacs will report that certain features from outline mode are missing.
The problem can be fixed if one reload the outline library again by hand using M-x load-library: outline, and then restart org mode.
It always happens when tramp is loaded before the org-mode. If a org file is opened before tramp, then subsequent tramp does not break the org mode.
So, there's the cause:
  • Calling tramp before org-mode
    (apparently only loads certain pieces of code that makes org-mode think outline is loaded, though it isn't)
And the solution:
  • M-x load-library outline
  • M-x org-mode,  or normal-mode,  or visit the .org file again
Is it fixed in later tramp / orgmode / aquamacs distribution ?