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Over at Geek.com there’s a good writeup concerning Microsoft’s Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP. This is a selling point as far as I’m concerned regarding Windows XP; its a pain to have to go through the SSH for Windows and VNC installs just to get a secure remote desktop solution.

Don’t bother SSHing anywhere to use Pine as your mail client. Just install Pine locally on your PC, Mac or whatever. Then set these configuration options under Setup and Config:

smtp-server = smtp.princeton.edu/user=”username”/tls/novalidate-cert
inbox-path = {imap.Princeton.EDU/user=”username”/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX

Replace “username” with your Princeton NetID. Save and exit the Config menu and go to Setup and Collection Lists. Add a new list and name it something descriptive of your Princeton account, like your username@princeton.edu. Under the server field put imap.princeton.edu/ssl/novalidate-cert.

There are many other options you can configure using Pine, but these few settings will get you started checking your email from your local machine.

I’m curious how other tech support types at Princeton, a major customer of Dell, feel about the latest licensing paradox. Has anyone seen this?

While I’m on the firewalling kick, I might as well discuss firewalling for NFS. Like NIS, NFS uses random ports for its various components. This can be troublesome when you wish to firewall specific services assigned to static ports. To get around this nussaince you can more or less configure the individual components to be forced to use static ports.

When I first stumbled over this annoying roadblock I simply searched the web for solutions. What follows is a composite writeup of what I’ve found works well in a PU environment.
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IPTSTATE rocks my socks… it will give you a real-time report (a la the top command) of the state of your IPTABLES firewall. Great way to make sure things are working as they should.

I’m inching my way back to good health. Until then my machines are doing a lot of the work for me in the form of scripts. Here’s one that continually displays the size of a given file/directory because I needed to watch the progress of a file being written to disk.

#!/bin/sh

while :
do
ls -la
sleep $DEL_TIME

Just what I need, sickness following vacation. Thus, I haven’t been as consistently verbose since my return.

Meanwhile, here’s a nice write-up over at pcstats.com if your hard drive is feeling ill. Its a good write-up from a beginner-level, but now and again each one of us needs a bit of refresher.