I had a novel experience this evening. Talking to my brother, via VNC. He was sitting at the console and I (being 200 miles away from him) was connected into the box via VNC. Does anyone know of a good CLI quick communication tool, along the lines of telnet, (not irc), that we can just connect together. Preferably something that doesn't require holes poked in firewalls.

Anyway.. getting off track. The reason I had to VNC in, was because trying to talk someone through using aptitude to resolve a distribution upgrade stuffup (dependency hell, type lockup) is near impossible. In the end, I gave up, and got him to poke a hole in his firewall, route VNC traffic to the box and activate "remote support" VNC access. Normally, I'd just ssh in, but this box never had openssh-server installed, and once it's in dependency lockup, you can't install ssh.

This is the main reason that I don't recommend Ubuntu to people who don't have someone close without enough technical knowledge to poke a hole in their firewall. What I really want is a basic binary, that I can tell the person to download and run, which creates an OpenVPN connection to my box (I'm hosting a VPN range for remote secure access to my home PC) and starts OpenSSH server.

See Screenshot of the session.

Header

I got bored with my old header image, so I decided to replace it. New quote, new colour shading, and new logo area. No more cracked slab gnome-feet, now ripples in a pond.

Random

I've been looking at the stats for this blog... Could the person who is using MagpieRSS to consume my blog's feed Comment or email me please, as I'd like to know how you're using it. (You don't have to, I'd just like to know. You have no idea how long I've been scratching my head over it, trying to work out whom/what would be using it. It doesn't appear to be a public scrape of my blog, as I check where my content goes every now an then...)

(I know its not the ubuntu-uk planet, they use python, not php...)