Program Arduino Pro Mini with CP2102 USB module

When I ordered a bunch of Arduino Pro Mini clones I didn't notice that these don't come with an integrated USB-to-Serial adapter (in fact I needed Arduino Nano - well, I was relative new into this).

So to get a change to use them I've also ordered a CP2102 board that converts between USB and TTL. Since it took a while for me to figure out how to use that I will document it here.

First, connect the CP2102 with the Arduino:

KDE: Remove "Switch User" and "Start New Session" from Plasma's lockscreen

If you are the only user on your workstation you probably do not have any need for the "Start New Session" button on Plasma's lockscreen. Quite the contrary it's extremly anoying if you just wanted to unlock your session and accidentally created a new one instead.

These is no UI switch to disable this button but you can use the KDE Action Restrictions for this. Just append the following lines to your "$HOME/.config/kdeglobals" (or "$HOME/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals") and login again:

[KDE Action Restrictions][$i]
action/switch_user=false
action/start_new_session=false

How to wake on lan a remote host on demand using systemd's sockets

Some years ago I wrote an article on how to wake on lan a (SSHFS) fileserver on demand using autofs.

Today I want to describe a more generic way to do the same. This should not only work for SSH but for every services that communicates via TCP. Everything you need is systemd, netcat (nc) and a wake-on-lan tool like etherwake.

Connect to FortigateVPN with OpenfortiVPN

I've got a lot of feedback for my old article How to connect to a FortiGate IPSec-VPN using Linux. However, the connection with vpnc was never stable for me, it always segfaults after a while and I had to restart it.

So I did some more research and found a relative new project called openfortivpn by Adrien Vergé, which uses the SSL VPN tunnel feature of Fortigate instead of IPSec. Additionally, NetworkManager support already exists thanks to the Gnome people.

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