WIFI TEST

netstumbler

martin

Hello John,

Well, it did reach from SF to Sacramento. I guess Marconi and Hertz would consider the test successful ...

Regards, Joerg

Actually, it seems to be working very well.

John

hi John, netstumbler is a nice little WiFi monitoring application

martin

What's it do?

I'm at a hotel in the middle of nowhere south of Boston, and XP claims there are nine free wifi's in range. Everything works great but Thunderbird, something having to do with smtp not working through other isp's. Webmail is a nuisance.

I thought maybe you were calling *me* a netstumbler. Well, actually, I did have a bunch to drink at the wedding in New Hampshire. It was a nice, traditional Irish Catholic Filipino Jewish ceremony, and by now I must be related to a third of the population of the planet. Those crazy Irish will marry anybody.

John

Last one of those I went to the priest got drunk and rowdy ;-)

I've only run onto a single hotel, in Santa Barbara, which offered true Internet access... I could even use Agent to read news.

Since then all I seem to find is web connection CRAP.

I'm considering renewing my pager service. I could send and receive E-mail from that... a few trivial "son-brew" executables handled everything so it went thru my PC whether in- or out-bound.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

It's not Thunderbird's fault per se. ISPs nowadays don't let you use their outgoing mail servers unless they're confident that you're actually a customer of theirs, either by having logged into your POP3 account first, and/or by actually being on their subnet. If you're using somebody else's WiFi node at random, you're not on your own ISP's subnet, so they assume you're a bad guy trying to use their SMTP server as a spam relay. Unfortunate but necessary.

Solutions are to use webmail (which I agree isn't ideal) or, preferably, to establish a VPN connection to your box back home. Once you jump through the latter hoop, you can use a virtual desktop client to actually work on your machine at home. That's especially nice because you don't end up with some of your mail being stuck on your laptop while on the road.

-- john

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Note: My E-mail address has been altered to avoid spam

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What is the most desirable/stable/secure way/program to establish connection thru your home box?

That gets my attention, at least once a month I'm stuck in some hotel, or at a clients site, and can't conveniently read my E-mail.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I have a newish Sony Vaio (very nice, 5 lbs, 4 hour battery life, about $1400) with XP and wifi. It seems to get good, fast internet connections in lots of places. It was free on the Cornell campus, free here at the Radisson hotel, and looks to be available at most airports for $6 or something like that. Once I select a wifi net, I can shut down the PC, power up later, and I'm still online. I'm impressed that this just seems to work... simpler than setting up my home DSL.

It's so hot and humid here, I'll just stay in and do work until dinnertime... Legal Seafoods in Boston.

They have Dunkin Donuts here, one about every 3/4 of a mile. I think the entire population of Massachusetts passes through a DD about three times per day. "Gimme a regula" apparently means "coffee with cream and sugar" I think. The latte is excellent (but you have to specify "hot", and then they look at you funny) and the Boston Cream donut is superb. Most people use the drive-thru for some reason.

John

Secure Shell, aka "SSH". It can be used as a tunnel for other protocols, such as VNC. For Windows, the Cygwin port of OpenSSH works pretty well. On Linux and other Unixen, it works great. The virtue of an SSH tunnel is that you need only open one port into your firewall, and SSH itself is quite secure. It can be a PITA to setup, though, so I would suggest drafting your son to get it going.

--
--Larry Brasfield
email: donotspam_larry_brasfield@hotmail.com
Above views may belong only to me.

[snip]

I have an older Vaio with Win2K

Good choice. I like that restaurant.

You had a "frap" yet? My first major mistake in Massachusetts, almost

50 years ago, was to order a "milk shake"... that's what I got, milk "shaken" with chocolate flavoring... no ice cream :-(

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Insufficient voltage: message returned to sender.

-- Paul Hovnanian mailto: snipped-for-privacy@Hovnanian.com

------------------------------------------------------------------ Bloody typical, they've gone back to metric without telling us.

ROFL need to dry the keyboard, again

martin

Depends on a lot of things, which is why I used the term "hoop." It is trivial to set up a VPN client on any modern OS (google 'VPN' and whatever OS you're using), but I've never had to set up a VPN server, and can't say what's involved. It's safe to say you'll need to start with a PC or a VPN router that has a static IP address, or one that's otherwise accessible through some sort of dynamic DNS.

As far as remote desktop operation goes, WinXP can act as a remote desktop host out of the box. I don't believe Win2K will do so without paying for a third-party package or using the GNU equivalent. The MS site has a free client that will let you connect to a WinXP machine from a machine running anything from Win98 on up (google "remote desktop client".) This stuff works VERY well, but you will have to do some searching to understand how to make it all happen in your specific case.

-- jm

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Note: My E-mail address has been altered to avoid spam

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