Tech Haus

I work in the IT department and we’re just rolling out Cisco VPN (with dongles) to replace our older ISA VPN. Seeing as my G1 is the first “smart” phone I’ve ever owned, I thought I’d get it setup to VPN in to work (So I could use the Android App Remote RDP). Unfortuantely it didn’t appear to be a simple app available to accomplish this feat. About two weeks ago, I stumbled upon this page which described how to configure vpn for Android. Using those directions (with help from the xda developer’s forum here) I was able to get VPN’ed into work, and RDP’ed to my workstation. Here’s what I did.

Requirements

• A rooted G1 with the tun module available (I used JF 1.51)
• JF’s Terminal Emulator (included with JF 1.51)
• Remote RDP
• Linux knowledge (optional)

Setup

1. Download the Get-a-Robot VPNC bz2 file from google code
2. Extract the archive (if on Linux you can use bunzip2, in Windows 7-zip works well) to a known folder. I extracted to c:\android-vpn\
   • Note: I did the bulk of this on Windows, but if you’re smart you can translate this to Linux
3. Open vpnc.conf located in ./data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/
4. Edit the file with information from your Cisco .pcf file. Below is the mapping of variables for vpnc.conf to YourFile.pcf.
   • IPSec gateway = Host
   • IPSec ID =GroupName
   • IPSec secret = GroupPwd (or if GroupPwd is blank, you’ll have to decrypt the enc_GroupPwd variable as shown below)
   • Xauth username = Your login username
   • Xauth password = Nothing. Leave this blank to have VPNC prompt you for your password every time.

   My vpnc.conf file (sanitized and with the wrong username):

   

5. Edit the vpnc-script and change the first line from #!/system/bin/bash to #!/system/bin/sh
6. Open a command prompt and push the files using adb push x:\path\to\data /, copying the edited script and config file to the root of your G1.
7. Mount the microSDHC card and create a new folder in its root called vpnc.
8. Create two files: go and prep
   go should contain this one line:
   /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/bin/vpnc /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc.conf --script /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script --pid-file /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-pid --no-detach --debug 1

   prep contains a few lines:
   modprobe tun
lsmod
mkdir /dev/net
ln -s /dev/tun /dev/net/tun

9. Unmount the microSDHC card and then fire up terminal emulator – we need to chmod a few files to make things work.
   chmod 777 /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/bin/vpnc
chmod 777 /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script

Starting the VPN

1. In Terminal Emulator type su to get root access (Approve if it prompts you to grant permission)
2. As root (designated by the “#” prompt) run cd /sdrom/vpnc
3. Run sh prep (Note: this is only required once each time you reboot your phone)
4. To start the VPN, run sh go. It will prompt your for your password, then attempt to connect:
   
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5. You can then click the back button to leave the vpn connection running and fire up Remote
   
6. To close the VPN, reopen Terminal Emulator, and if it’s still up and running, send the interrupt (ctrl-c) by clicking and holding the mouse ball, then pressing ‘c’
7. If the vpn is not still running, you can find the process ID number by running ps and looking for /data/data/org/codeandroid.vpnc/bin/vpnc.
   
8. Kill the process by running kill -9 [pid], (in our example kill -9 1896)

Final Thoughts

Although this isn’t ideal for an extended VPN connection, if combinded with tethering (something I’m working on next), it could become quite powerful. For quick checks, this works quite well.

Sources:
xda-developer’s forum
Uber Geeky post
Get-A-Robot-VPNC Google Code Page

After adding yet another app to my G1 I recieved my first “Low Disk Space” warning. I decided to see what options exist for moving the apps from internal storage to the SD card and found a few how-tos out there that describe the process. I ended up following the A2SD guide, with little problem.

The first step is to repartition your microSDHC card from one large Fat32 partition into two partitions: the first remains Fat32, the second is formated ext2. Since I don’t have a Linux box at work (and I was hoping to get this done over my lunch break), I fired up a VM and ran GParted, an open source Linux live CD that we use at work for resizing VM partitions. Using GParted, I was able to shrink the Fat32 partition from 4GB down to 3GB, and created the necessary ext2 partition from the remaining space. I should note that I used the phone as an microSDHC reader – it was on and functioning the entire time.

Since the Android SDK was already installed, the next step was relatively simple to complete. I fired up the command prompt on my Windows 7 box, and ran adb shell (this opens the shell on the phone).

To make sure the partition was correctly set, I ran busybox df -h and verified that the ext2 partition was showing up in the mount table.

Since I only want to move the apps (not their cache) to the microSDHC card, I only had to run one command busybox cp -a /data/app /system/sd. This copies all the existing app data from the phone storage over to the microSDHC card.

The next step didn’t appear to work for me… but for completeness sake:

I then booted my phone into the JF Recovery mode by shutting down my phone, then starting it up holding the Power and Home buttons. I pressed Alt-X to get to the phone’s terminal and ran the following commands:

mount data
rm -rf /data/app
ln -s /system/sd/app /data/app
reboot

I’m not sure what the first command does (mounts whatever device is mapped to data in the mountd.conf file I’d assume). The second command removes all apps from the phone. The next command creates a symlink from the microSDHC partition to the directory Android is expecting the apps to be located. Lastly, the phone is rebooted.

When I did these steps, it didn’t take – the applications were still on my phone memory (as evidenced by the free space available). As I think back, I may have forgotten to mount data (but one would assume I would have gotten some errors while trying to delete the contents of /data/app. I verified the apps were still located in phone memory by once again plugging my phone in via USB and running adb shell. I reran the last three commands above (from rm -rf through to reboot) and everything had successfully moved off to the microSDHC card.

Now I’m running over 70 apps, and the phone actually appears to be responding faster.