[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Hey the hotel has wireless! - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Tue, Oct 26 2004 0:14 bradley

Hey the hotel has wireless!

While the advertisement of the hotel only said “dataport” the nice surprise was that it had Wireless Access in the rooms.   Right now I”m not my “baby laptop”, my Acer Tablet PC just about ready for bed.  Tomorrow will be day one of a four day geek fest.  At the hotel I”m on a 172.16.x.x network here and one thing I forgot to do to this laptop just to do a smidge more security by obsecurity....not that I don't already have Windows Firewall enabled and Trend micro's turned on ...and no matter what Trend Micro's installer says, the two cohabitate just fine..... is change the Workgroup name to “not” be workgroup.  I try to make laptops that I use for the road to be “just for the road” and I don't have them as domain units.  If I'm hanging out in wireless all over the place, taking the laptops to security venues and loading gawd knows what tools on here, I don't like them anywhere near my production domain.

I consider this the ulimate “air gap”.  I will use a USB pen drive and what not, but my machines that are my “test beds” I like to stay separate from the real network. 

I also make sure my laptop is up to date on patches and anti virus def files if it's going out on the "highway".

What about you?  Do you take extra precauctions in your role as consultant to ensure that you don't get infected when connecting to others?

 

 

 

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# re: Hey the hotel has wireless!

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 9:25 PM by bradley

As far as the road goes... I have a demo laptop I use for presentations and such. This laptop is in a workgroup, and I run all my demos using Virtual Server 2005 (previously I used Virtual PC and VMware). When I'm done with my demo work I just blow away the image or archive it off for future use. I also perform billable work at customer locations. I again take advantage of virtualization by creating an XP SP2 image in Virtual Server and joining this to the customer's domain. That way I can have access to their domain without really getting my PC loaded up with their customer-specific software (VPN software, ISA client, etc.). I find this to be a really clean solution. Of course, if you know me then you know I'm always up-to-date with patches, Java VM versions, Anti-virus defs and hotfixes, etc. That goes for both physical machines and virtual machines too. I also advocate host IDS, although I recently uninstalled my copy of Cisco CSA because it was acting funny. I'll get it fixed and be back in business soon.

Cheers,

Jeff