Just had a problem come up with the conversion software I wrote to import data (my recent work... importing data from a competitor's website system into our websites. I'm not that good at it.. made a number of mistakes with the import, that we didn't notice till it was live data :(  )... This was quite a critical problem, as it involves the money part of the system.

This is where I come to love Ubuntu. I have a VPN connection to my work machine. My work machine is running phpmyadmin (a mysql GUI administration tool), with a connection to our database servers in our datacentre.

So, I just browse to the phpmyadmin server on my work box (which I've poked a hole into the firewall for http traffic coming from my home box), and get to work. Half an hour later, I've confirmed that the system isn't totally stuffed, and generated a couple of screenshots with a request for our customer to check the data over.

I wonder how long this would have taken with windows? The phpmyadmin was installed from the Ubuntu repositories (Yes, you can install phpmyadmin by running "apt-get install phpmyadmin". Very cool. Very handy!), the VPNs are powered by OpenVPN (encryption key-based VPN networking. Will work on WIndows, but it never seems to work as well as it works on Linux...)

I needed to modify my phpmyadmin config file on my work machine, to get it to talk to the mysql server in the datacentre. (I normally use a phpmyadmin served from the datacentre, VPN again). Was the work of 2 minutes to ssh in and use vim to tweak the /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php file.

Every now and then, its something like this that makes me think, how did I ever cope with Windows? No command line... need to use putty. VPNs a pain though openvpn makes it a bit easier, and you have to run a apache in an environment it wasn't designed for. Oh, and no apt-get....