It has been a while since I had written something, school and work has been in my way. For me, keeping tabs on how my home server’s are doing is vital. My telephone exchange, email, various bit torrent related stuff are all dependent on these computers. When I was away and wanted to do something, I would usually just open up Putty and ssh into my machine, creating a few tunnels while at it for accessing vnc and web administration through the SSH connection, but this can get pretty annoying since you have to download putty, enter in all the information, download a vnc client and then connect.

But the trick I found was to using batch scripts for windows machines and bash scripts when in linux/unix machines. So I would make a zip file in my server that would include putty, a vnc client, and two batch scripts (one for starting, and one for clearing up any traces). This way if I am somewhere remote, all I need to do is download that sigle zip file and execute the starting batch file which would automatically open up putty, connect to my home server including creating the various tunnels, open up vnc and connect to the home server through the ssh session. This is much better than doing all of that manually (although that would only take at most two minutes, this can be done in less than 10 seconds). And when you are done, just simply run the clean up batch file which would remove any temporary files created, and clean up the registry of the traces putty leaves behind. And the linux version is much more simple since the command line interface to ssh is easier, and simply uses X windows to open up remote applications.

In other updates, the dry ice cannon which I wrote about a few months ago exploded rendering it pretty useless. Parts of it such as the compression chamber section is still in good shape so I might use that to create something else that can harness the power of highly compressed air. I will try pick up pace with the website again and start posting some informative articles.