[mdlug] Need ideas for a "telepresence" box

[Ingles, Raymond]

A couple suggestions:

 1. Perhaps you could have a cell phone with no SIM card? If they want support, have them put a SIM card in, and use whatever data plan they have on that card.

 2. Set up at least two and ideally three different remote-access protocols. E.g. VPN, ssh, VNC, etc. If even one of them works, you can use it to debug the others.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On
> Behalf Of David McMillan
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 1:20 PM
> To: MDLUG's Main discussion list
> Subject: [mdlug] Need ideas for a "telepresence" box
> 
> 
>      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.
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