I’m now at Munich Airport after having missed my flight this morning (by only 5 minutes but still missed). Disappointingly after searching around I was unable to find any open wireless access points. The portal based ones were uncrackable and Vodafone wanted €20 to access it for the day. Good thing that the Thunderbird email client has such good off-line capabilities and I have been able to queue up loads of email replies that will get sent out when I reconnect in England.
I have next to me my old Dual G4 Mac that has been freshly installed with Tiger for my mother. It should be more than enough computer for her needs for a couple of years yet. Her computing needs consist of email, listening to missed episodes of the Archers on Radio 4 and visiting Amazon and Ebay. Two beefy CUPs and 1.5GB RAM should cope just fine.
She’s getting this machine which, up until last week, was my workhorse PC. I recently upgraded to a MacBook Pro. After 10 years in IT I finally bought my first laptop having preferred the configurability and expandability of desktops. I’ve never really had the need to work on the road and when I have, have made do with a badly set-up and difficult to use work laptop. So far the MacBook is working out well. I have set-up OpenVPN on it which creates a tunnel back to the Imaginator network in Franzstr 5 and allows me to access iTunes and files securely. At the moment this is done via NFS but I made good progress on setting up Samba to authenticate via LDAP (I hang everything off the Imaginator LDAP tree) and plan on rolling that out tonight or tomorrow.
I have been impressed with OpenVPN but am having some trouble getting it to use the existing DHCP server to hand out addresses and options like name servers. My mother’s G4, my laptop, my neighbour’s laptop and the Slomkowski Compound network all now connect back to imaginator through it. And so the imaginator DarkNet expands…
Should Anyone Ask 