WinVNC and PuTTY Part II

Turns out that the box didn't crash like I thought yesterday. My house had a power outage.. blah!

Today I was connected to WinVNC via PuTTY again, and this time I really crashed the box.. more or less because I was getting a little "too brave" if you know what I mean. I was messing 'round with Windows registry entries and so on, then on reboot the NT box I set up kept blue-screen'ing on boot. To those who don't know what that means: It means the box crashed on every startup.

So.. back to the drawing board. Reinstall of NT will happen tonight. This time I will tweak it before connecting remotely. (grin)

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WinVNC and PuTTY

I tried my hand at setting up secure SSH remote windows desktop today using WinVNC and PuTTY. (details how to do that here)

Reason for wanting to do this: To be able to access my home computer's desktop from work securely through a firewall, without having to pay for it. A similar service from GoToMyPC has a monthly fee attached to it. Screw that. I'm not going to pay fees just to access my home computer.

Anyway, it did work - sort of. It was really slow, graphics sometimes did not sync up, and the SSH server thing crashed. I think this is mainly due to the fact I'm connecting to a WinNT machine on a P200 (very slow considering how fast modern day computers are). I purposely connect to a computer that is not my 'main' PC, so that in case it crashes or gets hacked into (which is very unlikely), it doesn't matter because I can just reformat the hard drive and try again - which is what I will have to do tonight (groan..)

It was kinda cool to be able to get to my computer from work. It was also nice having 2-tier security in place.

It would be great if it didn't crash. 🙂 Hopefully this will be fixed tonight.

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Never let friends answer the phone

One of my friends happens to be a toy collector. Today I read a story on the 'net that says a particular Batmobile is having its wings changed because of a hazard problem (too pointy for children). What this means is that all future models will not have the pointy wings, and therefore the existing ones on the shelves right now will soon be a collector's item.

The friend I mentioned would obviously be interested in this (he's a toy collector), so I gave him a call. One of his friends answers. She says "He's in the bathroom", so I said "Well, can you go get him?" She then says "Uh, no." And I said "Please? It's important." She sarcastically responds with "I'm not going in the bathroom to get him."

I hung up.

This stupid girl could have easily just knocked on the bathroom door and said "Hey you got a phone call". I didn't tell her to go in the bathroom to get him. Nope. She was stupid and lazy.

This means I'm not going to bother to tell my friend about the Batmobile. When I encounter someone as stupid and as lazy as that, I got two words: "Screw it." His loss.

Sounds rude on my part, I know. But today's lesson is: You should never let your friends answer your phone, else you may miss important information you need to know.

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