I hate dialup....
I am at my holiday unit north of Perth to train the new complex manager on how to use Outlook Web Access. I love it up here; there is no phone line (no airconditioning either, but we live with that), no computers apart from my laptop, no fax machines, no stress. Sealions, dolphins, fishing, only 3 tv channels (when they're all working)
So why do I hate dialup? I'd forgotten how *slow* it is. When travelling I use the Telstra Minimax which provides wireless broadband anywhere in Australia where the CDMA phone network works (which is just about everywhere including the middle of nowhere) but when I'm out bush the speed drops back to standard dialup - not nice when I've got media intensive sites to visit as part of researching my next Internet Explorer Community Column, and somebody sent me a two megabyte email!!! What can I say.... please send me a link so I can download that funny video at a time of my choosing.
Even more irritating about dialup is although I can VPN into my office, Citrix won't connect - either my server is down (again) or dial-up is simply too slow for it (strike that, my server's responding again, but it is SLOW!!!)
Talk about Citrix... maybe somebody can help me make sense of something. Currently I VPN into the office, then fire up whatever programme I need as a published application using Program Neighbourhood. Sweet, and easy when it works.
So anyway, our IT outsourcers have decided we're going to swap to Citrix NFuse... how does it work? I VPN in, fire up Citrix Program Neighbourhood, start Internet Explorer, navigate to the NFuse log-in screen, log-in again, and am then presented with the same Program Neighbourhood that I used to fire up Internet Explorer in the first place .... ummmm, am I the only person wondering what's the point? We have to fire up IE via Program Neighbourhood to be able to access NFuse, said NFuse then offering us the same Program Neighbourhood, via a different interface, including, you guessed it, Internet Explorer...
I think I'll keep using Program Neighbourhood and published applications instead of jumping through all those hoops to use NFuse. And, if I were completely honest, I'd rather we didn't use VPN - its too risky security wise for my network if somebody with an infected pc hooks in... we probably would have been better off in some ways to continue using the Citrix ICA client to log into the network.