About to run off to the new ART Clinic building to do an assessment of their electrical and network systems for a future solar backup installation. But for those wondering about our setup to work remotely, here is a brief rundown of what we carried halfway around the world:
Equipment of Note
- 1 Sony Vaio Laptop
- 1 Sony Vaio Laptop (old one, as a backup)
- Multiple power adapters (Europe, UK/Africa), though converters not necessary since power supplies are multi-voltage
- 2 Wireless USB adapters (in case our internal notebook wireless adapters weren't up to the task)
- 2 Wireless routers (MSI and Rosewill), each with 4-port hub built in to ease networking the two laptops
- Various network cables
- Trusty wireless mouse
Software of Note
- Standard development suite installed/configured on both machines
- RingCentral Voice-over-IP (VOIP) call controller
- Skype
- Subversion version control / file sharing client (to connect to svn repositories in our data center at home)
- Outlook (to connect/sync with Exchange server, and thus Blackberry, hosted by Rackspace)
- Variety of web browsers
- Cisco VPN client, which has held up well even on lossy connections
Things have been working reasonably well as far as connectivity and electricity. The village has made a lot of progress in wireless coverage in the past two years when they first started to have internet connectivity via a microwave line-of-sight link. And they have reliable GSM network coverage via the Zain network. Not bad!
Seating by Herman-Miller