With the Sun Server at home, work has been a bit crippling especially when combined with moving. As some of you know, I have been using SunRays in my shop ultimately consolidating the number of full computers I would need running around the place. Now I have found myself in a situation where I’ll be working in a separate place completely on electronics design, computer issues, etc. I want a Solaris desktop across the internet, where I can use the PCI cards / for windows stuff. Have access to all of my data. SunRays do have VPN support actually, but as it would turn out I feel that I have come up with a solution for myself that will work but it still required a PC to get the job done, and I bet I wouldn’t necessarily need a SunRay that required VPN support either.
I have been using PuTTY for a long time with great success, using the tunneling feature my hearts desire to move files about or initiate a VNC session. and VNC would work good too, but the Sun PCI software doesn’t play very nice with VNC on Solaris 10 Sparc. SunRays across the internet offer something else too, you can pipe audio over, and use USB devices if you set things up correctly, just as if they were on the local machines miles away. (at painful transfer speeds I’m sure) It is a worthy experiment indeed, and since broadband internet is fast enough nowadays I don’t foresee too much in the way of lag.
So at my desk, I keep a Corei7 machine. This thing is a HOSS, and can crunch and edit video and happily do just about anything I throw at it. It runs windows since most phone flashing tools, etc are windows based. Its main goal is media production, and provides real-estate for web design. (If there was a good video editing suite for sparc solaris that allowed my firewire handicam I wouldn’t need the corei7 machine honestly.) The plan is to add a second Ethernet adapter in the machine, and then connect it up to a sunray. I plan to start by setting the IP of the host adapter of my windows 7 box to match the IP settings for the host adapter on the remote sun machine, and then forwarding all the appropriate ports within Putty across my SSH connection which should in theory create an encrypted VPN tunnel to my house where my server is located. IF I play my cards right the SunRay should boot from the host adapter in my machine right? Interesting plan indeed, so how will it work out I wonder?
Since I’m writing this at my desk, at the shop, and I’ve taken all the SunRays home already this theory is a bit hard to test now.. One would also think it may be hard to test at home on the local network, but it’s not!
I setup my ThinkPad X31 that I use as a tuning laptop so it’s a Windows XP machine. Since the laptop connects to the wireless network that took care of my “internet” connection right there. My SunRay network is a separate network altogether connected together with a pci version of a Happy Meal Card. (Dual Ethernet and dual scsi on the same PCI Card)
The results are inconclusive so far, I ran into a few limitations. One of them being that the PuTTY software only allows so many port forwards, so I cannot use a wildcard to forward them all, and I need to be choosy. I haven’t messed around with the setup too too much but initial testing was not successful.
I am also looking for other potential ideas for VPN solution so we’ll see how it goes.
Moving;
The shop is almost complete as far as moving out goes. There is only a car-load of stuff left to grab and I need to finish tiding things up before handing the keys back over. My desk is setup now at a nearby wireless store where I have found a good home repairing computers but more importantly taking care of the overhead that I once had. I have a place to continue working on everything, and the opportunity to continue to make cash until the next big thing is ready to go.
I am very sore, I didn’t know one could hurt so much from moving, but I’m glad that I am through most of it. There is a desk and showroom counter left in in the shop, as well as a large TV. If anyone wants these please let me know. I am also putting them up on craigslist so you will be able to check there to see if they still are available.
I imagine by the end of this week I will be in a pretty good position to start accepting work again. It is nice to be able to start working on everything again as I definitely felt lost there for a while being my only employee but all my time was wrapped up in moving.
I started this post a little while ago, couple weeks. . Since I have finished moving today was the first day I have gotten around to checking the website and getting things setup. Finally some construction instead of destruction. Sweet.
More is coming down the pipeline very soon. I am almost in a position where I can really start on the hydrogen power project.
On a sh*tty side note, my logic analyzer did not survive the move, the vertical hold is completely whack now for some reason. So I’m going to have to take it apart and see whats up before I develop anymore electronics. What a stinker.