Month: April 2006

I was eating my regular Green Burger (no, it’s not vegetarian) at Goodies today, when I noticed something WiFi related on the receipt. I looked closely and found out that there was a free WiFi access.

So, I powered up my notebook and decided to check it out. It got the IP address just fine, but nothing else worked. I tried to access a couple of sites with the browser – nope. Pinging a few IPs, including my own server did work either.

I looked back at the receipt and saw a randomly generated username and password printed on. At first I thought that these are for the PCs which are available to anyone at Goodies, but now I wasn’t so sure anymore. Probably they could be used to login to a proxy server or something like that.

IP settings showed 192.168.1.1 as a default gateway. So I tried that address in my browser and guess what – it worked. But I saw something totally different from what I was expecting. What I saw was a login screen to a 3Com wireless access point. It wasn’t asking for any username, and it printed ‘Default is admin‘ near the password field.

Sure enough, I typed it in and, o-oh, it worked. I got fully administrative rights to their acess point. I looked around here and there andn found an option that was saying something along the lines of ‘Allow all internal PCs access the Internet’. I enabled it and the web started working. Oh, my…

Complete self-service I call it – not only you have to get your own food, but you also have to configure your Internet access on your own.

Since I purchased my notebook and mentioned that I installed Fedora Linux 5 on it, I’ve been getting a lot of quesitons from people everywhere. One of the most frequent questions is “Does hybernate work?”.

You have to understand that this is my first notebook. At least in this century. So I am not very updated on the terminology and technologies involved. Trying to find out what ‘hybernate’ really is showed that different people mean different things.

Continue reading Hybernate. Don’t suspend.

I am entering a new era of computing.

Until recently, I had two primary computers – at home and at work.  Each one was for it’s own tasks.  If I needed to access one or the other – I always could do so directly, from one to another.  But that time is over.

Now I have more computers – NOC workstation at the office, my personal notebook, and a few more are coming.  They are also connected in a more complicated ways – not all of them are accessible directly from all other.  Working remotely passing through intermediate nodes is possible, but is not much fun.

One of the main annoyances is the difference of the command line environment.  Some computers are fine tuned to completely satisfy my needs.  Others have only a subset of settings.  Yet others – are untouched in this regard.

My environment should not be a full copy of the same thing across all machines, but rather a set of settings, which can be combined differently depending on a number of factors, like hostnames, usernames, software versions, etc.

I used to copy relevant parts of my configurations manually from one machine to another.  Then I wrote a simple script to do so.  Then the  script got more complex and messy.  It is time to change it.

After some surfing around I’ve decided to create a Subversion repository to store my home directories, or at least those parts that I need across a few machines. It seems like the most clean solution.

There are a few success stories on the Web that describe solutions for different scenarios.  They are all pretty close, but not exactly what I need.  It seems that I’ll have to work out a solution of my own.  Currently I am considering two possible ways.  Both of them, as usual, have their pros and cons.  None of them is yet perfect though.

If you have any experience with this or have any thoughts on this, please let me know.  URLs are especially appreciated.  I’ll keep you updated on my progress too.