Easter weekend and alot of work


Spent the weekend working on computers, room reconstruction and watching TV. I got back to working on the office room upstairs by filling all the voids in the plaster with structolite on Sunday. This took about an hour to do I had to fill in all around the window.

On Saturday I went to a buddy of mine’s client to fix her wireless networking problem. It seemed she had a Toshiba Tecra with Win95 on it and the D-Link wireless card stopped connecting to the AP. I got there and was informed that her company had reimaged the machine with Windows 2000. I stuck the card in and the OS saw the card loaded the drivers and rebooted. When the laptop came back up it connected to the Ap with out a problem and was able to get out onto the Internet. So after proving that she could get o n the internet from any where in her house she proceeded to tell me that she also couldn’t connect to her companies VPN. She tried it and it still didn’t work so while I was there she called the company’s help desk. We were told by the helpdesk dweb after we explained the whole setup to him. That they didn’t support the software through a home firewall and that we should connect the computer directly into the users cable modem. I then pointed out that that would put the company’s laptop out there for all the little script kiddies to attack. The best was he gave us a web site with suggestions on getting things working, but the site was on the company’s internal network…it just makes me cry on the caliber of today’s helpdesk personnel.

Rant
If you are a company that is going to put out a VPN solution to your users so they can work at home you need to design your software so it will work through home firewalls like the ones found in today’s cable/dsl/wirelessrouters.
/Rant

Finally got Red Hat 9 downloaded and installed on the laptop. The install is getting much easier and much more professional looking. The nice thing was I didn’t need to load the linux-wlan drivers for my wireless card. They finally got the hermer/orinoco_cs working with my card right out of the box. The other nice thing is Red Hat finally seems to have started using a better set of fonts so looking at the screen is much better and surfing the web so far has been a lot less painful to look at. I hope to write a quick review of RH 9 soon so check back soon