My last post on tethering the Blackjack as a modem needed a tangential update.
I’ve been working out of my father’s office in midtown the last couple weeks, using a spare desk and their DS3 Internet access. One small issue is their firewall blocks hamachi’s (the excellent vpn tool) direct VPN mode and the backup SSL mode isn’t working consistently enough.
A key thing I need to do with my hamachi setup is access our servers from Visual Studio. Fortunately I made the call to keep my development environment in a virtual machine. This makes it portable and easier for me to keep dev chocolate out of my everyday computing peanut butter.
Since I already have a wired, primary Internet connection, it doesn’t help to just connect the Blackjack and expect Windows to figure out how to route the traffic intelligently. I could, of course, alter my routing tables manually, but that is a hoop that I don’t really feel like jumping through. Fortunately all I have to do is connect the phone, turn on connection sharing and then go into Virtual PC’s networking settings and change the connection to “Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing…” and now my host PC can use the wired connection and my VPC uses the phone’s and connects through hamachi brilliantly.
Note, this is using Vista + Virtual PC 2007 + Samsung Blackjack, but you could use this same basic method with XP + VMWare + Verizon Q etcetera.
Side note: First use of Vista’s Snipping Tool — a screenshot tool that is built in and really well designed. I guess I knew about it already, but it took LifeHacker to remind me to use it. Reason enough to upgrade to Vista? 