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New Media Year

Posted on 20 Feb 2006 at 15:15

Paul Ockenden and Mark Newton look at the ups and downs of teleworking and try out a new anti-spam product that actually works

Obviously, this ADSL and cable combination doesn't have a 1:1 contention ratio and doesn't run BGP for most efficient routing, but at around one-hundredth the cost of a 'proper' diverse Internet feed we can probably overlook these minor shortcomings. The fact is that it works and works well, at least for a home-office environment.

Another obvious difference between home and company networks is how casually domestic IT kit gets treated, a classic example being Paul's recently acquired wireless router. It's a Belkin Pre-N device - PC Pro A-Listed at the time of writing - and it's a nice bit of kit, but Paul had a number of problems that Belkin's technical support people were unable to fix. In fact, having previously praised Belkin for the quality of its technical support, Paul's recent experience was very disappointing - a series of cut'n'pasted emails that showed the support people had neither read nor understood the problem reports.

However, a spot of Googling discovered a forum posting in which the author pointed out that the Belkin router uses pretty much the same innards as its Linksys rival. After downloading the appropriate Linksys firmware and a bit of dextrous hex editing, Paul now has a router that says Belkin on the outside, but actually thinks it's from Linksys. The main point is that it now works. Perfectly. All the problems that plagued the Belkin firmware have vanished.

Contrast this with what would happen in an enterprise IT environment. We all know that many manufacturers simply badge-engineer particular bits of kit, but would you dare to update the firmware on a Dell NAS box with HP's equivalent? Of course not, the support consequences would be unthinkable. But with home-based kit, if you trash a router, you simply go out and buy another.

Digging a tunnel

Those of you who do work from home probably use a VPN to connect to the office. This could be used for something as simple as checking your email or for more heavyweight changes to production servers. Either way, it can be frustrating when your PC drops its VPN connection after going into standby mode or hibernation, especially on a laptop you've set up to hibernate when you close the lid. When the machine wakes up again, you'll need to make a deliberate effort to re-establish the connection. Luckily, though, there's a way to automate this task. Create a file called resume.vbs containing the following commands:

Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Set colMonitoredEvents = GetObject("winmgmts:").ExecNotificationQuery("Select * from Win32_PowerManagementEvent")

Do

Set objLatestEvent = colMonitoredEvents.NextEvent

Select Case objLatestEvent.EventType

Case 7

oShell.Run "c:\path\fred.exe",1,true

End Select

Loop

where fred.exe is the name of the file you invoke to redial your VPN. If you're using the built-in Windows VPN client, you can use the rasdial command:

rasdial [connection] [username] [password] /DOMAIN:[domain]

What the above script does is set up a loop that gets triggered every time there's a power management event. Whenever it sees event type 7 (wake up from standby), it runs the external command. Once you've got it working, simply add it to your Windows startup directory, or add a new entry to this Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\

with a value of something like:

wscript.exe "C:\myScripts\resume.vbs"

Framed again!

Already, 80 per cent average growth over this time last year is being reported by many online retailers - a much rosier picture than the bricks-and-mortar high street is predicting. It remains a source of amazement how some of the major high-street retailers still don't get it when it comes to building an online shopping outlet.