Connectivity Day
So in theory work likes me to… ya know… work. Ya know, usually at least. Today, however, I’m dubbing “Connectivity Day.” Why?
- IBM corporate is switching the VPN software for (many of) its employees. This means I have to get the new VPN software installed and working on my laptop before tomorrow or else lose access.
- My cell phone reception at home sucks big hairy donkey balls. This isn’t a problem in and of itself: it’s sufficient if I’m just sending texts or chatting with friends. But if I’m trying to take part in actual business conference call meetings, it’s just not acceptable. And I have another one of those tomorrow. Did I mention I don’t have a land line? Some of my coworkers have reported positive experiences with Vonage, so I’m going to see how quickly I can get that set up.
- ISS, though now a subsidiary of IBM, still has its own private networks (in addition to IBM’s) and thus its own VPN connection. I’ve never had much luck trying to connect to it from my home Linux boxes, but it hasn’t been a problem because I haven’t really needed to access those resources from home. Well, now they’re testing a new VPN setup too, and they want me to try to get this new one set up from home. We’ll see how that goes….
- I leave my home wireless completely open to make it easy for guests to connect. I watch for neighbors and cut them off if they’re too naughty. But since it’s open, I maintain a firewall to prevent wireless hosts from connecting to my private wired network. This hasn’t really been a problem, but it would be extra‐nice if I could VPN in from my wireless network to my wired network. If I have time today, I hope to get that set up.
- And while I’m at it, I have a remote server on the ’net at a stable public IP address. It’s also not at my house. It would be nice to have a VPN set up between there and here so that I could connect from the server to devices on my home network. With some creative routing I could possibly even leverage that to allow VPN connections from other boxes (like our laptops where we’re not on our home wireless) into our home network, albeit slower thanks to the packetbouncing..
Sure, not all of that’s work‐related. I’m not sure I’ll have time for all of it. But it would be nice if in this day and age of connectivity I could actually connect to all of my resources. And as a software engineer who’s been living and breathing network security for the last seven or eight years, I really have no excuse. Fortunately, the only thing standing in my way is the time to get the kinks worked out.
So yeah, today’s “Connectivity Day.”