Nov 20, 2016 | eOS |
The last piece (I think) of my connectivity puzzle is the remote access back into my network when I’m away from home. This is really handy when stuff doesn’t work, and by using a Virtual Private Connection (VPN) also provides an added layer of security when I’m using an untrusted WiFi network.
I have an openVPN server running, you guessed it, in a freenas1 jail and use TunnelBlick on macOS and OpenVPN on iOS to connect to it and through it to the internet enabling me to use a connection which I know is secure, rather than one I don’t trust. Maybe I’m starting to sound a little paranoid, but I figure the more things I can do protect myself, the less chance I am to become another cyber security statistic which can’t be a bad thing 😉
Anyway, VPN is built directly into eOS and is simple to configure in the Network settings. I simply opened my openVPN configuration file and it appeared to connect successfully. This is actually difficult to validate whilst I’m already connected to my LAN, so I’ll try and check it out later in the week when I’m away from home, but everything looks like it should work fine. As I won’t be using this as my daily driver, I probably won’t use this a great deal, but it’s nice to know how easy it was to setup (unlike configuring the openVPN server in FreeBSD, to begin with!)
That pretty much wraps up my connectivity requirements, as I can now access everything at home and (hopefully) away. There are a few things that can make that a little easier though…
Nov 20, 2016 | eOS, Software |
I configured Dropbox in the last blog, which I use to send scanner output from my WF-3640. I also use it to sync a number of services between iOS and macOS devices (1Password, YNAB, MacDive, and Mindset to name but a few) but other than that I don’t really use DropBox for data anymore.
For me, and I suspect many others, Dropbox was probably one of the first ‘cloud’ services I used regularly. I guess I was a bit of a ‘Dropbox Evangelist’ when it first became popular, mainly as it made sharing files so simple, but also because for every friend you recommended they gave you an extra 250MB of free storage! I can’t remember exactly what you got free, to begin with, but over time I managed to increase my limit to 9.25GB. But once I’d realised how useful this was for keeping things in sync across multiple devices, whilst being able to share and/or access from any device, it really wasn’t enough. I know you can get almost an unlimited amount now for a whole range of different providers, and I’ve probably got basic accounts with many of them (Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Onedrive, Box, etc.) but back then it wasn’t particularly cheap to get more storage, and at the time I think I preferred the idea of keeping my data (especially the important stuff) on my hardware.
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Nov 20, 2016 | eOS, FreeNAS |
Why is this always so difficult? Surely it should be a simple in this connected world for devices to talk with each other without jumping through various hoops?
Playing with FreeNAS has developed my network understanding, but I’m still very much an amateur when it comes to fully understanding my ‘network stack’ I need to figure out the best way to talk to the various devices I have using a combination of sharing protocols (e.g. CIFS, AFP, NFS)
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Nov 18, 2016 | eOS, macOS |
Another great question! I guess my aim is to see if I could live in eOS should there come a time when I feel the need to ditch macOS.
I’m not going to get into the applications too much in the post and will save that for later when I have a nice and stable system that’s doing most of what I want. Needless to say, I know I’m not going to get some software that runs permanently on my Mac, but I know of alternatives for some (e.g. MS Office) and will be interested to see if new ones exist for others (e.g OmniFocus – I’d really really miss that!)
One of the reasons I love macOS so much is the interaction with the enormous trackpad. If you’ve never used an Apple trackpad you don’t know what you’re missing. If you have, you know what I mean. Using 2, 3 and 4 finger gestures is something I’d really miss and I’m going to try and tackle this early on. It’s one of the things that might have broken the 1st (undocumented) attempt, so I don’t want to get too far in only to find I break ‘take 2’
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Nov 18, 2016 | eOS |
Good question, and one I’ve asked myself several times since I started thinking about reusing my MBA to run Linux.
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t profess to have a great understanding of Linux or even how different distros come about. I’ve played with the following (alphabetically) VMs on my FreeNAS machine running in VirtualBox:
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