Packetfence is one of the most powerful network access control applications available. With this tool you can control who (what, and when) has access to your network.

• Ubuntu Upgrade Perl

Ubuntu Upgrade Perl

If you are concerned about network security, and you want the absolute most control, Packetfence is what you need.This power comes with a price, that price being installation. Game plants vs zombies. Packetfence was built for the likes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, but that doesn’t prevent it from being installed on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, installing Packetfence on Ubunt is one of the single most challenging installation tasks I have ever attempted. After spending a weekend working out the process, I can finally bring to you an easy to follow (though time consuming) guide to help you bring incredible control over your network.I want to share with you the process of installing Packetfence on Ubuntu and then how it can be used from the command line to create a powerful network access control system.Note, although Packetfence has an outstanding Web-based administration tool, getting it to work with Ubuntu (due to to the use of apache2 over HTTP) has proved to be a bigger challenge than just getting the system installed. If you are working with Ubuntu 9.04 or earlier, you will be able to work with the Web-based system, but any release later than 9.04 and you are stuck with the command line.The SetupI am going to be demonstrating the installation of Packetfence on Ubuntu 10.10. I am installing on a Desktop instance, but the same steps will hold true for a server installation. You will need to walk through the process of install the numerous dependencies, all of the Perl modules, and then compiling and installing the actual Packetfence application.

The Perl modules will take up the bulk of the installation time, so be prepared to type.Installing the DependenciesThe very first thing you should do is open up a terminal window and run sudo apt-get update in order to make sure your sources are all up to date. Once you have done that you have two fairly lengthy commands to run. It’s best if you just copy and paste these commands into your terminal window. The first command to run is:sudo apt-get install build-essential apache2 apache2.2-common apache2-utils openssl openssl-blacklist openssl-blacklist-extra php-log snort mysql-server libapache2-mod-proxy-html libapache2-mod-php5 php-pear php5-mysql php5-gdDepending upon what is already installed on your system, you may receive warnings that various packages are “already installed and up to date”. That’s fine, just okay the installation when prompted.After the first command runs to completion, it’s time to run the second command which will install as many of the Perl modules as possible. Some of these modules may not be found by apt-get, so they will have to be manually installed.

I have been using the an for my experimentsbut I think the same steps will work in any other Ubuntu-based or any Debian based system.Install Apache 2If you don't have it installed yet, you will need to install the web servers itself:$ sudo apt-get install apache2Install curlcurl can be used to fetch web pages.It is not a requirement for our set up, but it is nice to have on the server as it can be used to check the pageswithout opening a real browser. Besides, at least in my set up, I have configured the web server on a Virtual Environment,but I have not set up port-forwarding for port 80 yet and thus I would not be able to access the web server from mydesktop. (The article abouthas explanation how to set up the port forwarding.)$ sudo apt-get install curlTry the web serverAt this point we can try if the web server works:$ curl will print some HTML on the screen.Configure CGII looked around the /etc/apache2 directory, which is the standard place to find theconfiguration files of Apache. I've found the /etc/apache2/conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conffile that has a symbolic link from /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/serve-cgi-bin.conf.It has a section that maps the /cgi-bin path in the URLs to the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/directory in the hard disk and enables CGI execution in this directory.examples/apache/serve-cgi-bin.confDefine ENABLEUSRLIBCGIBINDefine ENABLEUSRLIBCGIBINScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/AllowOverride NoneOptions +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatchRequire all granted# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noetThat's not enough though.