Computerworld -
If you've been reading this column over the past couple of months, you know that my general theme is that I lack the time, money and resources to get everything done that I need to do. The last thing you would expect to hear from me is that I'm taking time off.
In three and a half years of working for this state agency, I haven't had a real vacation. But much as I'd love to spend time on a warm beach somewhere, I couldn't really enjoy that right now. I would be too burdened with guilt about how much work I'd be leaving my staff buried in.
No, my time-off request was prompted by something far more pressing than the need for a break. My dad, an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist, was diagnosed a year ago with "cognitive impairment," a nice way of saying "Alzheimer's." Now my mom plans to move them across the country to be closer to me. It's a big undertaking, and she already has her hands full taking care of Dad. She needs my help.
Of course, I still have to maintain the security infrastructure. Before I went on leave, I worked a lot of hours trying to get ahead on my project schedule. It's amazing what you can do when you lock yourself up in a lab, ignore e-mail and mute the cell phone.
In fact, by the time I left, I had managed to get two months ahead of schedule. With no time for chit-chat, I condensed my responses to questions and requests, even from my boss. I checked voice mail and e-mail when I woke up each morning, in the middle of the day and when I got home. If a message wasn't urgent, I ignored it or passed it along to someone on my staff.
I will also be working remotely from my parents' home. I've never had a problem burning the midnight oil, and Mom and Dad do a lot of sleeping. But I would love advice on the best way to connect to our security labs.
We have two labs, at opposite ends of the state. They're on a subnet that's separate from the production network. I work primarily in one lab and remotely log into the other, relying on a tech when something has to be rack-mounted, physically rebooted or moved. This has been working out just fine.
I want to be sure that I connect to the labs in the most secure manner when I'm across the country. I use a laptop with broadband wireless and access the state network with a Cisco VPN client. I use terminal services to log into my computer in either security lab via the IP address. That computer will not allow anyone else to log in, with the exception of a domain administrator.
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