You may some day encounter a situation in which you will require a wireless internet connection for a desktop computer. Perhaps you have decided to move your office from one room to another in your home. However, the new room does not have the cable or telephone connection you need to bring that computer online.
It’s your friendly neighborhood admin with another free small app that makes my day to day life easier.
When something goes wrong on my network I go to the log files. Sometimes these files can be HUGE and take forever to open. The information is usually at the end of the file (as long as the incident happened recently) so it would help if I could just grab the last hundred or so lines from the file on the fly.
File sharing between Macs and Windows is a little lob-sided. Out of the box, Macs can detect any Windows computer connected to the local network. It appears right on the Finder’s sidebar. So naturally, it is very easy for a Windows user to share their files with anyone on a Mac. The reverse process - allowing a Mac to share its files - requires a little more attention. The transition from Tiger to Leopard has made it a little bit more complicated for regular users to set up shared folders because the setting has been “disguised”.
If there is one thing I hate doing the most is walking people through IP address setup’s. In my company all of our machines are given static IP’s right out of the box. It helps us with tracking and auditing. A lot of users take their laptops home to use on their home networks in the evenings.
End users being what they are - They delete the IP information we have assigned them to revert to obtain an IP address automatically. What these users don’t know is that they will be unable to put the settings back (unless of course they wrote them down - YEAH RIGHT!).
What happens when BitTorrent meets Hamachi meets remote desktop meets networking? Well you get something similar to Remobo. Remobo lets you create an IPN which is an Instant Private Network.
Lets see what you can do with an IPN, Remobo and how to set it all up.
Remobo allows you to:
Hamachi isn’t a brand new utility or idea, but I did want to ’spread the word’ of this excellent program.
Hamachi is a service that runs in the background and connects your computer to any other computer you wish in a particular network. This creates an encrypted VPN (Virtual Private Network) between you and other PCs in your own network.
This becomes ultra convenient when you have a number of PCs that you want to connect to, for example if you have a work PC, home PC, school PC and/or servers. Once Hamachi is installed, the computers are available via IP address for their file shares, or any other service. Lots of people also use to play video games in a multi-player mode regardless of their location.
Hey MUO Readers have I got a sweet suite of free tools for you network admins and regular end users. Being in the networking world for so long I have loads of tools in my admin tool box (My USB Stick). But recently a fellow tech blogger Paul Bauer introduced me to a nifty program that has more than 175 applications and features.
Did I stutter?
There are so many applications in here that I can not even begin to list all of them here. It puts A LOT of tools at my fingertips in its < 25mb install The program is aptly named Net Tools 2008 and it was written by Mohammad Ahmadi Bidakhvidi.
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