EeePC, Portable Hdd & 3G Phone - On The Road!
Last week, I got a chance to use the system live, I was away for a week with only the EeePC system and a three.co.uk 3G phone from Sony for a modem. All did not go well!
As explained in an earlier post, rather than mess with the EeePC setup, I ‘mount -bind’ the /dev and /proc folders of a linux root system sitting in an external drive ( a portable hard drive being faster by a mile than a usb memory stick).
This allows me to take several systems with me when working away (or simply on holiday). I have a copy of the ‘general desktop’ I use day to day, the php & mysql system I tinker with and an OpenWrt buildroot system for the router. These all live in folders under the /vz folder of the hard drive.
I have tinkered with the system for a while now and it is quite a simple matter to press “Ctrl-Alt-T” on the EeePC to get a terminal, “sudo su -” to get to the root shell, I don’t even have to type the “mount –bind” or “choot” commands in, a couple of presses on the up arrow and they are there in the command history.
At home, the system works fine, I turn off the wireless, run the gsm script and access the web. With the 3G locally, I get between fast ISDN and early (512k) broadband speeds - not always good enough for Skype, but for general web browsing, emails and updating a blog, good enough.
However, last week, when we got to our destination (North Devon), I found that the phone only had a gsm connection - that starts at 9.6k. Downloading voicemail messages emailed from the office took about 5 min per minute of message! I got to keep up with the emails, but not much else.
The problem that stopped me dead in my tracks however, was that some websites (the bank, google adsense etc.)would refuse to completely load. All of the sites that failed were https sites. I keep shortcuts and login details stored within the “general desktop” system. These sites seemed to be loading up to the part of the page where the login details would show.
The slow connection had me thinking that the browser must be giving up before the page was delivered, or perhaps it was something to do with the gsm modem service.
When I got back, I set the system back up and tried both the wifi/broadband link and the 3g modem connection. Sure enough, when accessing the sites through the 3g phone, the same secure passworded pages failed. Accessing those same sites via the Wifi/Broadband everything was fine. Being back at the office, and with a faster connection, and copies on hand, I was able to try a few things out.
Re-naming the .mozilla folder caused the browser to ‘forget everything’ and I could once again access the sites. Swapping back to the regular .mozilla folder, I dug a little deeper.
Deleting temp files made no difference (I had tried that whilst away), deleting the mozilla cookie files revealed them to be the problem! Now some of the sites I need store part of the account details within cookies, so I guess I’ll have to make a few notes before setting off next time, as it seems that some site/cookies hold info about the connection you logged in with.
So, if you have any trouble accessing a passworded site and you are plumbed in to a different connection, try deleting or renaming the cookie files within the .mozilla/firefox folder.
With access to some sites, impossible and others slow, I was not able to do to much with the EeePC/Hard Drive combo this trip. The system however, as a means of keeping several working environments accessable from the EeePC (or any other linux laptop) is - in my book - a winner! The Hard drive (or memory stick if you favour battery operation over speed) can be carried away from the laptop, if that gets lost, none of your work or passwords are on the internal drive.