[ale] Network downsizing

[David Hillman]

I have spent the last couple of months downsizing our home to just an Ubuntu
and Macbook laptop for me and Windows laptop for my wife.  We also have a
fast desktop for everything not covered by the others, but it sits silent
most of the time.  Let's not forget the iPads and the Playstation 3.  The
iPads we use for general Web browsing, ebooks and watching Netflix.  My iPad
has a Guizm OpenVPN client, along with VNC and SSH clients.  That PS3 does
nothing but get updates all the time, but it is useful for a little gaming.
 It's actually a pleasure to use, now that it isn't on a network.  The main
reason we decided to make the change is to simplify our home life.  Both of
us stare at computers all day at work already.

Our home Internet and TV services were canceled last month.  We take walks
at night; however, we haven't reverted back to the Stone Age.  My wife has
Clear service from the office and I have Sprint MIFI service for my laptop
and my iPad.  We are waiting on USB over WiFi to get the printers in with
the program.  Bluetooth works now but it is slow.  What a relief it has been
to not have to worry about maintaining a physical network at home.  No more
cursing at that damn router whenever visitors come over with their laptops
and phones.  It's always my wireless network that's the problem, never their
POS devices.  Even better, my cheap neighbor can no longer mooch off of our
connection.

The only problem for me is the hassle that I have to go through to quickly
test out things that require a network.  There is always the work network,
but I don't like to mess with that.  I was thinking it would be nice to have
a private network in the Cloud.  I know Linode gives public and private IPs
that might work.  If I could set up a small Linode box to act as a VPN
gateway, I should be able to get other private virtual boxes on that same
network without having to maintain physical assets.  When I don't need the
network anymore, I simply shut it down and go on about my business.  Linode
even has scripts to get the boxes back a certain way if I need to.  Am I
shooting myself in the foot here?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20110907/54d68c18/attachment.html