Our assignment was to get OpenVPN working on a device, connected to a pre-setup server with keys generated for us.
I installed openvpn and ssh on my virtualbox Ubuntu machine pretty easily. Using ps aux | grep ssh allowed me to see that ssh was running. I have a little bit of experience in bash command line, so things were coming back to me and I was starting to get comfortable.
Long story short, one of the steps in the directions threw us off. The wording as a little confusing and me and a few of my classmates spun off in different directions trying to read documentation and figure out if we were doing things correctly. It feels like no big thing when written out in a short paragraph, but we spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out “where the client.conf file was supposed to be generated?!”. Turns out a separate email was sent telling us to download an example from a github page. d’oh.
Don’t want to ramble about my troubles, but there are all kinds of fun hurdles when you aren’t truly experienced in the command line.
But if I needed to sum it up:
Though, I finally got it working:
Shout out to Mithru, who was a huge help. The command line is a cold place. Take a friend with you when possible!
The reading was Built to Last chapters 3 and 4. Glad we’re coming back to this book in the assignments. “Preserve the core and stimulate progress” was the take away for these two chapters.
Again, I’m not coming from a business background. But I am getting some good motivation and high level ideas from this book. While there are points where I think that the author dwells a little too long on one idea when it is probably safe to move on, I wind up appreciating the direct and emphasized summary of the philosophy. These aspects seem like they should be easy to grasp, come up with, and follow. But I’m sure many companies have thought that, and failed because they may not have truly adhered to the “core and progress” model in a way that is sufficiently fanatical.
I see parallels with personal art practices and life goals, as well. But even disregarding a translation into other areas I am interested it, it is nice to see these types of thoughts floating around in a business book. It is tempting to be cynical about business. I’m glad to see a earnest and potentially positive take on some of these issues.
Plenty to think about. Not sure how specific a core value can or should be, but I keep returning to thinking about what my company’s core value would be.