PenguinREPORT

Even though I’m tempted, I won’t keep hammering on Qwest. It seems like every time I mention them, I get hit with more and more horror stories about their service and support. So, rather than flood my own inbox with responses, I’ll tell you a bit about the solution I’ve worked out for development access.

As I told you earlier in the week, I’m finally running a pure Linux box at home. My wife’s adjusting nicely to her setup and with each passing day the likelihood of returning to Windows at home diminishes. That makes me very happy. However, it still didn’t quite get to the root of the development machine access problem, because my Internet provider has recently changed over to DHCP. That means I’d have no way of knowing, from the office, what my current IP address at home is.

Enter TZO. TZO is a dynamic DNS service, providing a domain name for dynamic IP addresses. In fact, what they do is to provide a domain name service that, like your IP address, is dynamic. The TZO client checks your IP address periodically and notifies the TZO DNS when the IP address has changed. Then the DNS record is updated for your domain name to reflect the new IP address. It’s not a completely new solution to dynamic addressing problems, but it’s really the most functional I’ve seen. And, TZO offers two Linux versions - a .tar.gz file and an .rpm.

So what’s this all meant to the Penguin development environment? Despite having no Linux-useable Internet access in the office, I’ve been able to access my machine at home via a Cygwin shell and TZO. That’s put development of upcoming Lockergnome features back on track and given my co-developer Jake a way to access the development server.

In fact, I’ve even quit checking my email at work. Instead, I open an ssh session to my machine at home and check my mail via my favorite email client, Pine. Since the home machine is where my procmail filters are, I only see the mail at work that I need and want to see. How refreshing.

TZO isn’t free. But, for less than the monthly cost of hosting a web site, you can have a full year of service. It’s been a great tool to overcome the pitfalls of Qwest.

Have a great Wednesday.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison