September 2006

HOW TO : Blackberry : How to use it as a modem

On popular demand..A lot of people asked me how you can use the BB as a modem, the way I specified in this post. Here’s the link with detailed instructions on how to do this..

http://www.blackberryforums.com/blackberry-guides/2019-user-howto-use-blackberry-modem-laptop-11.html

Note: Make sure you have an unlimited data plan from your service provider or you can get dinged with a large bill :).

Yet another site powered by the masses

www.soapboxit.com is a website where anyone can write/search reviews about anything. I came across it when I learnt that one of my old colleagues is going (looks like I got the wrong company. The company he is going to work at is www.soapboxreviews.com) to work at this company. I think it is an interesting idea. As with all social networks, the challenge will be to gain momentum.. As I was browsing the site, I noticed that each new user is given a ID. At this point, the ID seems to just be an increasing integer. I found that my ID is 212 🙂

http://soapboxit.com/person/212

RDP over SSH tunnel

Necessity is the mother of invention.. Or so goes the old saying. I was on-call this weekend for off hour IT support. We usually provide our on-call engineers a wireless broadband card in case they need to get connected to the corporate network to troubleshoot/fix issues. This week, I was not able to get the wireless card, since we had to loan it to an exec. The only method to get onto the Internet was using my new 8700 blackberry. We have the EDGE service from T-mobile, which is not as fast as the Verizon BroadbandAccess.. We typically get ~128kbps with the EDGE connection and is enough to get our work done.. The problem with using the BB as a modem is that T-mobile blocks PPTP/IPSec traffic with this plan. Not to be outdone, I came up with a way to use the BB to connect to our internal network. Most of our support work is done on Windows, so we need to remote console into one of our servers to provide support. I did the following to get this working using our corporate SSH gateway to tunnel RDP traffic.

1) Download Putty (SSH Client).
2) Create a new session on Putty to the SSH gateway. In the “Tunnels” option, add the following options

Note: Replace the REMOTE_HOST with the IP address or hostname of your Windows server.
3) Click on ADD
4) Click on Open and connect to the SSH server with your credentials
5) Log into the remote serve by running the following command “mstsc /v:127.0.01:3390
Note: You can change the local port to any number you want. Make sure not to use 3389 as the local port, since it is already used by the remote desktop service on your windows workstation.

Labour day weekend : Good Beer, Good Friends.. Good times :)

It’s amazing how fast holidays zip by :). Wish, it was the same with work days…. Lakshmi and I didn’t get a chance to travel during this long weekend, but we caught up with some sightseeing in Chicago. We visited the Field museum, using the free family pass you can get at the Chicago Public Library. For those of you who are not aware, you can get free passes to most of the attractions in Chicago. All you need is a membership at the library. Each library has limited quantities of the passes and it is given out on a first come first serve basis. A great way to explore the city without breaking your bank :). It was great day to visit the museum. I took some snaps from the trip and posted them on Flickr

We also got a chance to catch up with old friends..Sudheer and his charming wife, Neelima flew down to Chicago for the weekend and all of us got together at Ravi’s place for a night of fun, beer and food :). It was great to catch up on life and fondly remember our days at school. As usual, me and my camera were busy snapping pictures of the night…


[Left to Right: Back Row: Shekar, Achi, Ravi, Byna, Sudheer Front Row: Nirmala, Pallavi, Madhavi, Deepthi, Lakshmi, Neelima]