Creating a Portable Environment
By S. Lee Henry

Whenever I travel to customer sites, I often spend half a day or more 
connecting my laptop to the network, determining the proper gateway and 
DNS servers to use, and getting acquainted with my new, albeit 
temporary, environment. When a critical problem needs to be addressed, 
spending time getting on the network and becoming both functional and 
comfortable eats away at my productivity. Using a borrowed laptop, one 
not already set up for me, further exacerbates these problems.

To reduce setup time, I depend on a few handy tools and tricks. Not 
knowing much about my future environment, I ensure that certain, useful 
software is already installed on the laptop; otherwise, I install it as 
soon as possible. PuTTY is an especially useful piece of software for 
Unix users on the road.

PuTTY is free software that provides an ssh client, telnet, and raw ? 
something I haven't even tried to figure out. With PuTTY on my laptop, 
I know that I can log in to the increasing number of systems that 
insist on ssh and disable telnet.  PuTTY also does both ssh1 and ssh2, 
and saves settings (e.g., hostnames, IP addresses, and telnet, ssh, or 
raw selections), providing me a way to record (instead of having to 
remember) the systems that I can connect to.

PuTTY also allows me to change my window colors.  This may seem like a 
minor advantage, but when the only comfort I have is my screen (I often 
end up working in computer labs on whatever small piece of desktop is 
available), it's nice to set it up in a way that appeals to me.  You 
can download PuTTY from 
	http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

NetZero (http://www.netzero.com), of the "free Internet access, free 
email, fast connections, and thousands of access numbers" fame, is 
another friend of the road warrior. The NetZero software contains a 
directory of local numbers providing free dial-up access from almost 
anywhere in the country. I simply identify my area code and prefix, and 
it usually provides several connection numbers. Hotel rooms with fast 
Internet connections are still the exception rather than the rule, so 
it's nice knowing that I can get online using the hotel phone if I need 
to without scrambling around for the phone numbers of access devices.

I also reduce travel stress by maintaining several files on a personal 
account that I can telnet and ftp to from anywhere. A shell account on 
world.std.com allows me to store aliases, paths, and useful scripts. 
Instead of creating these files from scratch, I grab them as needed and 
set up my working environment as close to familiar as I can under the 
circumstances. To avoid changing the environment on, essentially, a 
guest account (especially if it's the root environment and my role is 
that of visiting troubleshooter), I can set up all of my path changes 
and favorite aliases in a non-standard file that I source as needed.

When working on many different systems at a customer site, including 
the hostname in my prompt is helpful -- especially until I become 
familiar with the various systems and the roles they play. Including a 
command to change my prompt (e.g., PS1="'uname ?n'> ") in my portable 
environment helps to remind me which system I am logged into in each of 
several windows open on my screen.

I enjoy business travel, but find that reducing my setup time allows me 
to become productive more quickly and get a lot more done before it's 
time to go back to home.