[mdlug] Need ideas for a "telepresence" box

[David McMillan]

     My situation is this:  I have a large industrial system that is 
being shipped before long to the end customer in Western Europe. The 
machine has a number of Human-Machine Interfaces that are essentially 
Windows PCs with special GUIs, running on their own fixed-IP LAN.  The 
customer wants my employer to be able to do remote support of this 
machine on 5min notice, but their IT department is being all kinds of 
obstructionist.  So I'm thinking of doing an end run:  divorce this 
machine from their corporate network entirely (it doesn't need to be on 
their main network for production) and simply add a box (preferably 
Linux, but that might not be my call) to the LAN with a cellular modem, 
DynDNS, VNC, and a few other software tools that need to run locally 
(for example, I'll probably need to be able to run two lightweight WinXP 
virtual machines in parallel for some proprietary diagnostic software 
that, sadly, has no Linux version).

     Of course, the biz being what it is, I'm not going to have a chance 
to test out this rig before it ends up on the other side of the pond.  
So I'm soliciting opinions on whether this is a workable idea, and what 
I can/should do to have a bulletproof setup from the start, to avoid any 
mad scrambles later in the game.

     For that matter, does anyone know much about cellular modems and 
service in Western Europe?  I keep hearing (mostly from bragging 
Euroids) how much better, faster, and cheaper their Internet is than in 
the US, but I don't know much about the details.  Particularly, what it 
takes to get a good broadband wireless data plan without taking a 
multi-year contract and getting into international financing issues.  If 
they have pay-as-you-go plans that we could refill remotely at need, 
that might be the way to go.