Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Just Because I Can

So as I write this post, I am connected wirelessly to the Internet - no power cord, no cord anywhere in this building governing my ability to connect. Okay, so there's a tiny USB cable between the wireless card and the laptop, but stil, that's pretty remarkable. So just for fun, I logged on to my old server at work (which serves as a VPN terminal for my brother-in-law most of the time now). And then I updated the Quickbooks software on it so it would be ready for the new year. And then I felt like updating our cash advances, so I used another remote session within that one to get on the new server and fire up Quickbooks. Then I toggled between an internet page on the old server and the Quickbooks software on the new (all while the update was installing on the old one) as I entered the advances. All from the comfort of the floor outside my children's bedroom door as I lay there in the hope they would GO TO SLEEP!

Seriously, though, is that not one of the neatest things to be able to do? Actively do work on two computers OTHER than the one I'm actually doing it on? After the update of advances, I was able to back up the Quickbooks file on the server (that makes six places the company data file exists now, unless you count the RAID duplicate which makes seven in that case), then I logged out of that remote session. Then the update on the old server was complete and the computer needed to be restarted, so I I rebooted it and ended that session.

I just find that session amazingly cool. No, I'm not a workaholic. I just did it because I'm not going in at all for five days, I knew there were a lot of things written today, and this saves me having a hectic Monday when I get back. I am really looking forward to the days off. Hopefully the pest control service has made some headway on getting rid of the mice. I got one, but I will let anyone interested in just how read about it in my wife's blog, attachedparent.blogspot.com, since she plans to write a detailed post about our whole Christmas Eve, which started and ended very nicely. Tomorrow will be a lot of fun with and hopefully for the kids, so I'm excited.

If our son would just sleep.... he may be down finally... just past midnight.... I wonder if he's scared Santa is really coming, since he didn't like Santa at the mall. Who knows, Merry Christmas everyone!

-- Robert

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's was pretty cool. What kind of server are you using?

Robert said...

These are not actually servers in the fullest sense. They are filesharing hosts of important files on a network. They simply run XP Pro. I use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to the static IP (purchased with my internet service) which has a VPN router on it to manage the remote session. We have a full-time VPN tunnel between offices for other reasons, but anytime one of us is outside the main office and wants to access data, we can use the remote desktop from any XP Pro computer (haven't tried it with a Vista machine) provided we have the proper IP address and login information. It took a while to set it up right because we had to learn a lot about VPN setup on our own, but I could probably repeat it if I had to now.