Re: Recommendations for laptop for travelling

Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

One last note is that you shouldn't depend on being able to run
remote X. Never mind that it's likely to be painfully slow whenever
the 'net has a high spam day, I've found an unbelievable collection
of completely random port restrictions in hotels and conferences.
Have a good plan for syncing your local environment to your home
environment, sync up before you go, pray you've got email, and sync
again when you get home.

I very much appreciate the comments of yourself and others. Big
help. But here you loose me.

What is the relation of running X remotely and "port restrictions"
because of heavy spam? I don't see the connection. Most of the things
I do can be done in console, but while that's a lot faster, why would
that not be dependent on "port restrictions".

Sorry, my wording probably wasn't clear. I was saying that

(1) remote X, as in needing to go further than the local LAN, is very
slow; if there is a heavy load on the network (what I jokingly called
a "heavy spam day") it becomes ridiculous. It's not as big a problem
with a console application because the amount of data being
transferred is much less, and a short delay on keystrokes isn't nearly
as annoying as slow response on a typical X application.

(2) worse, the local sysadmins seem to decide completely at random
what ports they regard as security holes. While I have been places
where I couldn't get ssh or vpn, I've been more places where I
couldn't open an X connection.

Also, what do you mean by "syncing your local environment to your home
environment"? If you mean alternative ways of connecting, to what to
you refer specifically?

I keep my work-related directories on my laptop, my home workstation,
and my workstation in my office at NMSU synchronized using rsync (I've
got a script on both the home workstation and the laptop called
'sync-nmsu', so I just give that command). One thing I'm very careful
to do before any sort of travel is make sure my laptop is synced just
before I leave, so even if it turns out I'm out of contact I can keep
working, and then sync them back up when I get home. The laptop is
what I had in mind as 'local environment' in this case.

Another question regarding the slowness in running X remotely. I'd
guess this usually has little to do with the speed of the user's
computers at either end, but more the connection between them. Are
these servers about all the same? Are they better in urban rather than
rural areas? How likely is one to find a connection as one travels to
various places in this country and outside? That is, how should one
modify travel plans to accommodate remote operation?

It's limited by the slowest connection between your laptop and the
machine in your office, whatever that is (and in this case, 'slowest'
can mean either longest latency or lowest bandwidth). I haven't found
any correlation between city/rural or anything else. It just seems
random.
.

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