Granted, I tend to be a little… extreme… in the oddly setup network scenarios. Still, there are times when I need to make my freaky little combination work with a client’s environment without reconfiguring their network to meet my own needs.

I have a client that has a PPTP-based VPN solution in place. While I prefer a more robust SSL or IPSec VPN– this isn’t about me. That’s what they have, and it works for them. I needed to make my tools work with that situation.

On my end, though, I run a Linux desktop with virtualized (ask me later) instances of client servers or development environments. In this case, I had a Windows XP guest system running, but I needed to be able to access my Linux system as well on their network. So, while Linux’s NetworkManager would happily make a connection to their relatively oldish VPN server device, I couldn’t make another from the XP client at the same time.

What’s more, their VPN server device was having no part of routing my network’s traffic. (Note: I am not specifying the parts involved here because I don’t want to start a ‘you should have done THIS!’ discussion. I’m very much a ‘get it working and move on’ person.)

(continue reading…)

If you’re like me and have more than one machine to worry about, you’ve no doubt tried to remotely access one from the other.  There are times when you just can keep getting up to go over to the other machine just to enter some command or see how something’s running.  Then there are times when one machine is in a colocation closet in San Francisco, and you’re living in, say, Japan, like I was.  Or maybe your mom can’t get the 12:00 to stop blinking on her VCR (and she still has a VCR), and now she’d like you to figure out why “the Internet is broken.” (continue reading…)