WIFI TEST

[John Larkin]

John

 

[martin griffith]

John

netstumbler


martin

 

[Joerg]

Hello John,

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

Regards, Joerg

 

[John Larkin]

netstumbler


martin

Actually, it seems to be working very well.

John

 

[martin griffith]

Actually, it seems to be working very well.

John

hi John, netstumbler is a nice little WiFi monitoring application


martin

 

[John Larkin]

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

 

[Jim Thompson]

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

 

[John Miles]

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.

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

 

[Jim Thompson]

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

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

 

[John Larkin]

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

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

 

[Larry Brasfield]

....

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

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.

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 11:21:52 -0700, John Larkin

[snip]

I have a newish Sony Vaio (very nice, 5 lbs, 4 hour battery life,
about $1400) with XP and wifi.

I have an older Vaio with Win2K

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.

Good choice. I like that restaurant.

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

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

 

[Paul Hovnanian]

Insufficient voltage: message returned to sender.

 

[martin griffith]

Insufficient voltage: message returned to sender.

ROFL need to dry the keyboard, again


martin

 

[John Miles]

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

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