RoadTrip07

Google Map of the trip

Day 1

Midland Park, NJ to College Park, MD - 2007-07-16 We made it without issue. Stayed at a hotel. I got to see Mariah, the high point of the trip. It's just downhill from here...

Day 1 and it starts. Without checking before I left, I now realize that I haven't used wireless on my laptop since I had a processor and hard drive replacement. The proper kernel modules weren't present, nor was there any way to install them. I had spotty-at-best access to the hotel's free WiFi network on the Nokia 770, and was able to download the madwifi RPM's to the 1 Gb RS-MMC card. It was at this point that I realized I left the RS-MMC to MMC/SD adapter at home (why would I ever have to take this card out and put it in a full-size reader like *cough* the one in my laptop?) With an Ad-Hoc WiFi network out of the question, I was stuck.

At Mariah's house I was able to get wired access and install the madwifi packages. Two hours of playing around, reconfiguring, and rebooting got me to scan and detect/list networks, but no ability to connect. I downloaded the ndiswrapper package and called it a night.

Day 2

College Park, MD to Lynchburg, VA - 2007-07-17 The first problems with my Mio c310x GPS. Somewhere about 20 miles out of Lynchburg, Route 29 disappeared from the map. It showed us driving through the ominous green "unknown area" while in the middle of a state highway! Taking a few exits and trying to recalculate found us in an endless desert of "Unknown Road" with no route to our destination. Pressing on, we finally - magically - popped back onto 29 South. At two points, the GPS ordered us to take an exit and cross over 6 lanes of traffic back to the entrance ramp to the same highway. There was also the prerequisite amount of "turn left in 100 yards" beckoning us to turn onto a non-existent road or, in many cases, disregard the correct highway entrance ramp jughandle that would loop back in the correct direction, in favor of a "sharp" (180-degree) left over 4 lanes of traffic - apparently the "shortest" route.

Much to my enjoyment, the Sleep Inn at Lynchburg has 100 Mbps wired connectivity. A quick run of tcpdump and a Python script I wrote that extracts all IP addresses showed me that I was most likely operating on a switched network, and confirmed that wireless traffic was not coming over the network (I connected my 770 via wireless and generated some traffic, looking for its' IP or relevant protocols and data). Mind you, I did all searching in script and deleted the temp files so I never saw what was flowing over the network.

This was secure enough for me to check my web mail and Facebook. At least for the time being.

I did some hunting around trying to configure the VPN that I promised to finish before I left for the trip, but true road warrior VPN configuration is no light matter, made worse by the fact that I was working from a hotel room, and that my only access to server config was via Lynx in an SSH session to a box at home.

At this point (18:51) I've decided to hold off on the VPN until later tonight, and see if I can at least get IMAP to tunnel over SSH for now (and maybe OSCAR also...). Dinner, then more work...