Steve DeRose's Road Warrior Guide: Connecting

Internet Access

Be sure you have multiple ways of getting online while on the road.

Dial-up

Connecting by modem is required less and less often; most hotels now provide Wi-Fi, as do many coffee shops and other venues. I no longer carry phone equipment, but if you frequent places where you'll need it, consider:

• Download and keep the telephone access numbers ("points of presence") for your ISP(s) before you go. Get the info you need before you leave. If you're on the road and can't get online, it's hard to get online to get the list of how to get online.

• Practice getting online by phone before you leave home, and do it on a few trips whether you need to or not. The key is to know how to recover when your configuration goes south and help is a thousand miles away. So practice.

• Make sure you have some means of local access in other countries; phone calls home can be expensive. iPass is one service that provides this at reasonable cost; join ahead of time.

• Carry a single to double phone adaptor, in case your hotel doesn't provide a dataport on the phone. Carry a guerilla telephone kit, and know how to use it. This is so you can plug in even where the phone is wired straight into the wall instead of using a plug. But in either case, be absolutely certain you're not connecting your modem to a "digital" phone system -- this can destroy your modem, or bring down the entire hotel phone system (a friend of mine actually did this at a conference we were at, which did not go over well).

Wired access

• Don't take hotels' claim to provide "high-speed internet access" at face value. Some will advertise it, but only mean you can plug your phone modem in, or may only have WebTV™ or equivalent, which is not functional enough. Some others have WiFi or Ethernet, but charge for it.

• Be sure your email service provides Web access. At some conferences and Internet cafes I've dealt with, they could perfectly well let you put your laptop online -- but won't. That leaves you with Web mail access on one of their machines. There are legitimate security concerns behind this; but you still need a solution. Thus the need for Web access to your email, and something like a flash drive that you can download it to.

• Kinko's, apart from being a lifesaver for road warriors in many other ways (printing, shipping, passport photos, business cards, supplies, overheads, etc.), commonly have a great policy re. Internet access: Most also have Macs and PCs on the net, which you can use for around $12/hour. Most also have an Ethernet cable where you can plug in to access their printers from your laptop (and pay a per-page charge for printing, but no hourly fee). Most are quite happy to let you sit there and get mail or surf at the same time, for no charge. This is a remarkably generous policy -- so if you take advantage of it, I strongly recommend that you also:

  • Buy something. Do a little copying, but a new pen, ship something, print something. Surely they have something that you'll use eventually.
  • Be extra nice to the staff. Some of their support staff are utterly clueless about configuring, but as a true road warrior you shouldn't need to ask. For example, I once asked what the IP address of a certain printer was, and the Kinko's staff person confidently replied "it's just port 1" -- that was useless, but I could get the IP address by poking at the printer's control panel for a minute. You can do that to. Even if you know how, don't go mucking around doing portscans etc; just get online, do your work, and leave things in better shape than when you came in.
  • If there are other people waiting, don't abuse the privilege of free access -- get on, get your mail or whatever, and get off. Don't stay connected while you read and reply, just do it offline and then connect again for long enough to send. If people start hogging access, Kinko's could find it necessary to start charging (though for any Kinko's executives reading this, I add that I think the value you get in goodwill, references, and extra sales once you have us in the door, outweighs the cost of having a couple chairs, tables, and cables, and using a little bandwidth with essentially zero marginal cost.

• Warning: Some Kinkos seem to use Ethernet cables to interface parallel-port printers through some kind of convertor. These oddball cables are not commonly marked, though. If you're staring at a mass of cables trying to figure out where you should plug in, keep this oddity in mind. Also, be sure you have your own ethernet cables -- the public ones at Kinko's take a lot of wear and tear, and some are unreliable.

• Every time you're at a Kinko's, suggest to the staff that they add a wireless access point. They could do this for dirt cheap, and it would greatly ease access.

Wireless access

Know the "warchalking" symbols that show where open wireless nets happen to extend onto public property. If you see two "C"s back to back, that indicates an open network. Whether it's open because the owner wants to be helpful to passers-by suffering Internet withdrawal syndrome, or because they forgot to set a password, of course varies. In either case, don't abuse the opportunity or hurt anything, because if that becomes common people will start closing down their nets, and everyone loses.

You may want to know the names and default passwords for the common wireless access point hardware. There are many, but lists are available online. If you have a wireless net at home or office, you need to be aware that there is such a thing as the default name and password, so you can change them if you want to close or secure your net.

You might consider a wireless net sniffer. Software for your laptop can use your wireless card to look around and detect networks in the area. One free program for this is Kismet.

Communicating with other laptop users (local area networking)

Be sure you have multiple ways of moving data between machines.

Removable media ("sneakernet")

Be sure to have at least one device that can read and write a commonly-used removable storage medium; and carry blank media too. The obvious choices are:

• A CD-R or CD-RW drive (probably internal)
• Flash memory sticks

Local Networking

• Ethernet cable: Carry a long one so you can reach from a conference table to a wall plug and not have people trip. Make sure it's rated CAT5, CAT5e, or CAT6. Also be sure your cable has rubber "boots" covering the latches on its plugs -- without those, the latches will break soon, making your connections unreliable. Use colored tape strips to mark your cables at both ends, which helps a lot when sorting out wires at a hub.

  Some companies make retractable cables, which are far nicer for throwing back into your bag at the end of the day. But these are usually short, you might want to carry two or three: you can be a hero by sharing, or if you also bring couplers you can make a long cord out of short ones.

• Ethernet crossover: A regular Ethernet cable works for plugging into a hub, but to plug two machines together without a hub you need a "crossover" cable (unless at least one is a Mac -- Macs auto-detect the cable type and deal). There are three ways to do this:

  1. Carry a whole crossover cable. If you do, mark it very distinctly -- I recommend using red cable or red end markings for this and this only.
  2. Make a crossover extension cord from a CAT5 plug, socket, and a short piece of cable. The adapter plus any regular Ethernet cable makes a crossover; put it on a crossover and it makes a regular. The wires should be connected as shown in my Ethernet Wiring Guide page: one end as T568A, the other as T568B. Tape the socket end up nicely to protect the connections.
  3. Buy a regular-to-crossover adaptor (a mere $2.95 at Altex -- this is a great gift for geek friends).

• Wireless: Make sure your laptop is equipped to access, or to host, a wireless LAN. Know how to set up a new local network.

If you are going to a conference and want to be a hero, take along a hub and perhaps some extra ethernet cables. Hubs now are dirt cheap, tiny, and light. For conference-room or airplane networking, don't waste the energy or money to go higher than 10MB. It may be possible to find one that can be powered from a USB port (one less power supply to carry).

Ethernet setup

You also need to know how to configure systems to use Ethernet when there's no network infrastructure around. There are basically two ways:

1. "DHCP" is a system where when a device plugs into the network, it broadcasts a request for an IP address to use. If there's a DHCP server on the net, it should then reply with an assigned address to use, along with addresses for the router, gateway, dns, etc. Some control panels call this "obtain an IP address automatically". This is easy for all the machines plugging in, but somewhere there has to be a DHCP server. Many routers have this built in (though they're heavier, more expensive, and can't generally run off USB, unlike hubs). You can also get software and configure your laptop to be a DHCP server for the others. For Mac OS X an example is ___.
2. Manual IP assignment requires no special DHCP server, but requires each machine to set it's own address manually. Several ranges of numeric IP addresses are reserve for "private use"; use these. The most important one is 192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255. For small networks, put everyone in the range 192.168.1.2 through 192.168.1.250, and have everyone set their "subnet mask" to 255.255.255.0 (which requires all but the last number to match throughout the local network).

Once you've got everbody talking to everybody, you need to use programs and protocols for moving data around. For example, you may want to make a "guest" account on your computer and enable access to your machine via telnet, ftp, or other protocols. On Mac OS X you enable the kinds of access you want to provide, in the System Preferences / Sharing control panel; you create accounts for people using the System Preferences / Accounts control panel. "guest" and "anonymous" are commonly-used names for such accounts. Once you've done this, people can run telnet, ftp, or a browser. To reach your machine they need to use your (numeric) IP address, whether you got it from DHCP or manually (look it up in the Network Control Panel).

I don't know anything about how to configure "Windows Workgroups" and such for file sharing, but I presume it can be done that way too.

Information transfer for a whole group

• An Ethernet hub: You can get an 8-port, 10MB/second hub for well under $40. They're so small and light now that it makes sense for a few people to carry them when going to conferences or moderate-size meetings. Even better, go for a hub/firewall combination that can run DHCP to assign addresses to all the computers automatically. In my guide on the Targus Universal Power Supply I discuss how to make a cable that will let you power an Ethernet hub from your USB port -- some companies even make the right cable for their hubs.

• A wireless access point: this is a base station that can coordinate communications between many wireless-equipped computers. Most can also connect to a larger network by Ethernet and/or telephone modem, thus giving all the wireless machines net access. Some wireless cards are able to serve as an access point all by themselves; obviously having one of these is nicer than carrying more equipment.

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