Allison & Don re VPN Have to say, I gave up on the audio and waited for the text and tutorial to post. So Sorry if in my late-night inability to absorb by auditory input is why I’m possibly posing a dumb question. For several years I paid for the WiTopia VPN service. Don is right. It was pretty expensive for the few times a month (really, few times a year) I used it. WiTopia did have the advantage that I could drop onto the Internet in the UK (Hi!
Don!) or Australia (Yo, Rose!) or NYC (Whazzup Linda?) I don’t remember if there was among the many portals NZ (I see Allister eating lunch), but WiTopia did provide many connections across the US and around the planet. But WiTopia was one way only, out. I used it at Starbuck’s, etc., and rarely from home or office. While WiTopia masks the user IP to a website I visit, there was no “security” assurance (I could find) that WiTopia wasn’t keeping the link between me and GamblingLunacy.con in its own records. My wife’s HAL 9000 corporate VPN allows her to securely connect to HAL and run all the gear and software to which she’s assigned from anywhere. Does the VPN running on a MAC allow the connected user full control of the Mac, e.g., OS X file and screen sharing?
I presume the outbound IP remains the same as the home/office IP to which the VPN connects, e.g., the one the home/office ISP provides? Say I set up Don’s VPN. I’m connected to my “base station” computer at work or home. WiTopia didn’t.
Twit.TV “Know How” did an episode on setting up a VPN: Leo Laporte frequently talks about the HotSpot VPN which is both a service and a gadget: LifeHacker recently did a survey-review of commercial VPNs (not for connecting back to your own computer at work or home). You will find it at: —– Here is WiTopia’s Privacy Policy: Do you keep logs of my activity?
Can you monitor my web surfing? We are not set up in any way to directly view an individual customer’s activity, nor do we monitor, capture, or store logs that are directly attributable to any individual customer. Some indirect data, and the other bits that are cached during the regular course of running an Internet business, are regularly destroyed, mostly during our weekly maintenance windows.
Betternet unlimited free VPN Proxy for Chrome enables you to access to all blocked websites and makes you secure.
In fact, we only keep this minimal and temporary “trailing log” of indirect data in case we learn a user is violating the terms of use, e.g. Spamming, committing crimes using the service, etc.
In that specific case, we will report this to our abuse team, determine the guilty party through a laborious matching process, terminate their service, and take further action, if necessary. I will second Allister’s recommendation of PCalc, I own it on both iOS and Mac. However, I am firmly in the RPN camp, I find it a much simpler and more consistent approach than remembering the precedence of operators and dealing with parentheses (and any learning curve involved should be well within the range of anyone who can program 6502 assembly language). Another good option on iOS is the PowerOne series of calculators, they are about halfway between a calculator and a spreadsheet. Like PCalc it comes in free and paid versions, even the free one is quite powerful, and it supports both algebaic and RPN modes. It also comes with a number of fill-in forms for various calculations and the versions of the calculator differ only in which forms you start out with (Financial, Scientific, etc.) but it really doesn’t matter, since you can download for free whichever ones you want from the hundreds on their web site.
Bob, when I say I could program 6502 assembler, I didn’t get terribly far past “Hello World”. I lacked the headspace to think large enough to make anything much more useful than the odd interrupt routine to annoy my friends by periodically switching key codes. evil grin I guess I was never really taught RPN in any great measure. I have vague recollections of it being mentioned in class at some point, but it was forgotten along with lots of other stuff I never ended up using.
I have no trouble thinking in order of operations and parentheses, well those I deal with on a regular basis in my programming that I do at work. Interestingly, I find a reasonable number of quiz questions and puzzles are based on tricking people who don’t know how to deal with order of operations. I’ll have to give PowerOne a go – not that I need any more software – as it sounds interesting. And while it’s probably completely different it reminded me of my Casio PB-100 that I used in my later years at high school. Now THAT was fun! On the DNS issue, I found (in researching something else) that if you have iCloud set up at all, you don’t have to use a dynamic DNS service. ICloud is doing it for you.
One site that explains this is (I think that’s the first one I found, but there are a few others). The dns-sd -E command seems to only work when you have Back To My Mac (BTMM) enabled. The key is that if you have BTMM already on, you don’t need another dynamic DNS service — Apple has already provided you one that will show the public IP of your home network. @Jan — speaking as one of those corporate IT people charged with securing the crown jewels:-), one thing you’ll have to be careful about is port 80 proxies.
Many corporations that allow port 80 outbound do so through a proxy server that inspects the traffic (such as the tools from Blue Coat). They may well reject port 80 traffic that’s encrypted, because that’s also one of the tools that bad people use to get access to their command and control networks. You should be able to get your router to do the port forward (see ) for some suggestions. Getting it to change TCP 80 to UDP 1149 could be a bit more of a challenge, because you’re crossing protocols.
I’d suggest getting openVPN to listen on a TCP port as a means to make this simpler. You might want to test from someplace other than your corporate network first, however. As noted above, if you tried it here at my place of employment, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work (because we often reject non-HTTP traffic going out on port 80) and you might get a call from the helpful folks in security looking to see if there’s malware on your computer trying to access a command and control (C&C or C2) network.
Hello Bruce – Thx for your reply. I know VPN traffic on port 80 is allowed. I checked with corporate security. They even advised me to do so because the wifi I’m connecting to at work is the “guest” wifi. Maybe I did not really put my question the right way.
I’ll try again: What I’d like to be able to do is go through port 80 into my VPN at home. I know how to set up port forwarding on my time capsule, just do not know how to change the openvpn I set up using the nosillacast screenshots tutorial to accept traffic on both 1149 UDP and port 80 TCP. Thx again all for your help. I have a more pungent question: How do you change the server config from UDP 1194 to TCP 443 (my corporate network doesn’t allow me anything else). I did not see anything regarding this and i would like to access the tunnel through that port. I’ve found a few things on how to change the server.conf from opt/local/etc/openvpn2, but i am not sure if that is the config i need to edit.
Also, can you tell us the command that starts the openvpn connection daemon? My error: Connection refused on port 443 (no firewalls in between, portfw was done on tcp 443, server.conf was modified to TCP. Thanks for the replies.