Author Archives: Robin

Carry your PC around with you

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Here in the office we have a problem with people who work 32 hour work weeks – it basically means that one workstation is unuseable for one day per week per 32 hour employee. This means we have troo many computers. As space is at a premium, we need a solution that allows employees to sit down behind any PC, log in, and be faced with their own desktop, email settings, bookmarks, etc etc.
At first though one would go for roaming profiles, but as profiles here are around 1 GB large, It would take too long to copy the whole profile from the server in the morning and to the server at shutdown time. Also it’s not unheard of for one person to log into two computers at the same time, which brings problems when they log off the PCs in the “wrong” order. Also, reading the samba documentation and commentary, people who try to implement this all seem to think it’s a bitch to do.
Then there’s an Active Directory server. I don’t know Active Directory and I don’t feel like installing one of these things and administering it (hey, I like LINUX servers!). Apparently though this is supposed to be a viable option.
Then there’s thin client setups. Unfortunately we all need to run photoshop. A server running 8 concurrent copies of photoshop is going to cost me much more than I want to spend on this project.
So I started looking for ways to store your domain profile on USB flash drives. The XP user manager doesn’t allow you to edit or even acknowledge domain profiles, so I can’t just set the clients to read and write to a USB stick.
After a lot of looking around I found these alternatives:

IBM’s Soulpad technology, which saves the state of the OS as well as the rest, looks cool, but it’s only in technology demonstrator, ie. not available. In the article comments is an interesting description of how to emulate the technology using VMWare on an iPod.

U3 claims to be able to do this using USB drives from different manufacturers and some software they’ve created.

The U3 drives seem to be a virtual server type solution, and many of them come with Migo Data Synchronization, software that allows you to copy profile information to USB sticks or iPods.

Viewing the internet

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There are a few ways to visualise internet and the traffic on it.

One way is to map it. The BBC has a good article on this.

The following programmes take a starting point and use linking for distance. The amount of links to and from a place is used for size.

I/O/D 4 (the webstalker) is one of my all time favorites, but lacks 3D representation, scaling and movement.

Surf 3D has several different viewing modes, and allows you to move through the map. Unfortunately the interface is a bit cluncky, allthough it gives you loads of options.

Here is a large list of links to mapping projects

The above can lead to complex maps, usually starting from a single point (a URL).
More simply, smaller datasets can be mapped.

3D Traceroute turns a traceroute into a complex grapical representation.


Xtraceroute shows a 3D globe and shows the path of the packets over the globe.

There’s a visual whois programme which alsow plots queries over a 3D globe and shows the information next to it.

Another method is to browse traffic and see what it’s doing.

Swarm shows what other swarmers are doing, with the page with the most traffic in the centre.

Driftnet displays the graphics being surfed on websites (and there is an enhancement which also displays mpeg and audio streams) over the network (install on the router)

Webcollage randomly pulls images from internet and throws them up on the screen.

Then there are more freeform methods of viewing the internet.

Driftnet ver.0 (not to be confused with the driftnet above) starts with a URL and displays in hexadecimal and screenshots, using waves to decide where to go next.