[mdlug] Need ideas for a "telepresence" box

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 10:20 -0800, David McMillan wrote:
> 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).

Yep, some type of third party data connection is probably your only
workable and legal solution.

>      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.  

Of course!  Testing?! Pfhhht.  Management hears "testing" and thinks
"err?  you mean time you aren't wasting on other projects that will
probably never get deployed.  just ship it."

>      For that matter, does anyone know much about cellular modems and 
> service in Western Europe? 

AT&T should be able to provide you with multinational modems.  A USB
modem plugged into something like one of those raspberry thingies
booting and running of an SD card would probably be ideal.  

Cellular providers over here will know exactly what you talking about
and will be able to recommend devices and they all provide M2M
(machine-to-machine) metered data plans.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams  GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA