brentashley

I’ll be going to the WiFi meetup again tomorrow Wed 14 Jan at 7pm. Tim Aiello will be there with his Linksys webcam, which we’ll broadcast from http://meetup.megahuge.com (link will fail if you try it now – only active during meeting) via some SSH port-forwarding magic. We’ll also be available for text chat at http://www.blogchat.com, so no need to brave the forecasted -35 Celsius windchill!

I’ve been doing a bunch of wireless lately with my laptop. On publicly available networks, whether paid or free, WEP is usually not enabled, so anyone could easily come by with a tool like kismet and watch your traffic including POP and FTP passwords etc.

As an independent consultant, I don’t have a corporate network with VPN access through which I can secure my communications, so I’ve had to make do with what is available to me.

I have SSHD, smtp and a web proxy server running on my home network, so on my Win2k-based laptop I have set up a PuTTY connection with the following ports forwarded:

6588 – http/s proxy
25 – smtp (allows relay only from self)
110 – pop3 forwarded to pop3.simplefilter.com

On the laptop, I have a hosts file entry mapping the pop3.simplefilter.com to 127.0.0.1, smtp set to localhost, and my browser and Trillian proxy set to localhost:6588.

With this setup, all I have to do is run PuTTY, connect securely via ssh to my home machine, and then all HTTP/S, POP, ICQ, MSN, and YAHOO traffic happens securely through my tunnel. Running netstat on my machine shows one connection home and a bunch of localhost connections.

Microsoft has a new campaign to provide corporations with “the facts you need to make the choice between Windows and Linux”.

One of their facts, titled “WinTel Server 10 Times Less Expensive to Operate Than Linux Mainframe”, says:

Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple WinTel Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator

An odd comparison to be sure, like comparing apples to orchards. How do multiple WinTel Web servers stack up against multiple Intel Linux Web servers, I wonder?

By leading off with such transparently evasive comparisons, I’m really not encouraged to attach any credence to the rest of their arguments, however valid. I can’t say that I really even care to read on to the meat when the headlines and intro blurbs make their assessment of my intelligence pretty clear.

It seems that spammers generally observe the western/christian holidays. The quiet that my inbox and blog comments enjoyed over the past week has been replaced with a barrage of spam since yesterday.

I went out today and got a Zonet 4-port KVM switch complete with cables from Logic Computer House for CDN$89.

Works fine with Linux on my server machine (both console and X), Win2k, DOS and Windows 9x so far. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work with anything, really, because there is no interaction with the operating system. It’s great because it emulates keyboard and mouse for the non-active ports so my compaq computers will boot without me hooking a real keyboard to each of them.

Cables are very high quality well shielded, can do up to 1920×1440 resolution without ghosting.

Amazing deal, really. Used to be a single high quality KVM cable set was at least $50.

It’s been a while since I visited this VB app I’m updating today for a long-time client. I forgot about this gem:

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We had another great WiFi meetup tonight, with all sorts of people and their electronic goodies. Tim and I arrived at 7 and met up with Joy, who works her web wizardry at ACTRA. Soon after that came a contingent of Tucows fellows, headed by boss Ross who had his sleek Gateway laptop, along with Joey with his Mac laptop, and others – I’ll let them blog who all was there – I was wedged into a corner and not able to effectively schmooze along to the other end of the table.

Joey’s housemate Sam, already a tech person, came to widen her geek experience and along with Joy helped to balance the X chromosome deficiency so often found at such gatherings.

Here’s a photo of the non-camera-shy side of the table:

I had just bought a new USB wireless adapter, so I had both the laptop and the Zaurus up and running. I finally got a chance to use the Spotnik wireless access, if only for a short time since there was much conversation to be had.

Ross and Joy got to play with Knoppix on a couple of the laptops. I’m pretty sure that next time we see Joy, she’ll be a newly minted Linux expert with tons of wireless toys and an empty bank account.

I’ve been to the last few Toronto Wifi Meetup meetings. They’ve attracted a good range of people – technical, industry, simply interested. WirelessBandit has been along in the flesh to keep us up on trends and there has been an eclectic range of laptops and handheld devices to fawn over.

The next meeting is on Wednesday, November 12th at 7pm at the SpaHa cafe at Spadina and Harbord in fairly-close-to-downtown Toronto. Wireless access there is provided via Spotnik, whose marketing director known as Spotnik_Girl has attended in the past.

I’ve been trying to get a bunch of people out for some general yappage and cameraderie, so I suggest people sign themselves up for this and come along – Ross and Joey of BlogWare fame are the first two on my list.

Come join us, bring your wireless toys and let’s chew up some bandwidth.