A couple of months back I wrote about the upcoming Nokia N810. A nifty little device, which I still think I plan on buying. I haven't been able to find one in stock locally yet, and had wanted to check it out in person a bit before plunking down the cash.

In the meantime, there has been a lot of hype around the Asus Eee PC, which fits into the UMPC (ultra mobile PC) category instead of the handheld sort of form factor of the N810. Both devices run linux and support various 3rd-party applications and linuxy-type hacking. I'm not a Windows user, I think that OS has deteriorated through progressly deeper levels of suck over the last 20 years. My main computer is a MacBook, and most of my back-end servers are linux variants of some sort.

For a while now I've really been craving an ultra-portable computing device with good wireless connectivity options (Wifi and some sort of cellular), a decent browser, and rich 3rd party application support. This last reason is why the iPhone is out of the running for me. (Yes, I'm aware of all the iPhone jailbreak stuff, but if I'm going to depend on this device, it can't be a constant battle against the manufacturer to use it the way I want.) As I said before, the Nokia N810 seemed like it might be the answer (and it still might), but I'm *really* enjoying the Asus Eee right now.

One of the first things I'd figure I'd have to find a way to get running was to have the Eee talk to my Verizon USB720 EVDO modem. People have got the USB720 running on linux, and the Asus runs linux, so I figured I could find some patches, write some scripts, curse a bit, and finally get the USB720 working. Instead all you have to do is open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type "sudo pon cdma". Bang. 10 seconds later I'm online with my Verizon Mobile Broadband connection (oh yeah you have to plug the USB720 into a USB port first).

Form-factor wise, the Eee isn't small enough to stick in your pocket or wear on your belt (note: if you CAN wear the Eee on your belt you're either an EXTREME nerd, or EXTREMELY overweight. Seek help in either case.) It does fit okay in a large coat pocke, and of course takes little room in the backpack "go bags" that are pretty ubiquitous these days.

A comparison showing my MacBook, the Asus Eee PC and my wife's DS Lite. The DSLite is probably a touch smaller than the N810, and is a clamshell instead of a slider, but you get the basic idea:

The Eee seems sturdy and well built and has a nice pearl finish. The one downside is that I think the form factor falls right in the middle of usability hell. The keyboard is way too big to be a thumb-device, and too small for serious touch-typing.  I usually adapt to new keyboard sizes/layouts fairly quickly, but it's still taking me some time to get used to the Eee keyboard size/layout.

 The Eee has some key features that N810 seems to lack though, including a VGA output port, so that you can use a larger LCD when you are someplace stationary.  The linux distro on the Eee is (from what I gather) more standard than Nokias "Internet Tablet OS".  The Eee also has a "real" office suite, something important if you're looking for a PC-on-the-go, vs. a portable Internet tablet.

I'm still getting used to the Eee, but it seems more hackable, more-linuxy, and certainly more powerful than the N810.  The Eee, plus my Blackberry, might just be the ideal combo of power and portability that I've been looking for.  I plan to void the warranty on Eee soon and add more memory and an internal bluetooth adapter soon.

I've been a "smart phone" and "portable computing device"- or whatever you want to call it - user for quite a long time now. In fact, one of the first devices I carried was a Motorola PT when I was working for IBM Field Service in the early 90's. We affectionately referred to the PT as a "brick", brick obviously meant something different in those days than is does now. But, the differences are only slight. In actuality, "brick" was a too-kind designator for the PT, as the PT was larger, heavier, and uglier than a common construction brick.

On the upside, though, you could use your PT to send messages to other employees in the company, order parts, get service call details, do your time accounting, and other fun things. PT's had, IIRC, a 2x40 line LCD display, and a full qwerty keyboard. It was basically a wireless 3270 dumb terminal that tied into an (IIRC) Series 1.

Since that time I've gone through a fair bit of tablety devices and smart-phones (which were various degrees of "smart" or "phone", but rarely ever both). I don't have to go over all the various quirks and limitations of things like the Palm VII, or the Audiovox Thera, if you've been down this road also, you already know what I would write. And if you haven't been down this road, well, you haven't missed much.

I've almost pulled the trigger on buying one of Nokia's previous-gen Internet Tablets a couple of times, but they just seemed to be not-quite-there. If the n810 lives up to its hype, I think it might just be as good as it gets for a while. I don't relish the idea of carrying *something*, plus my Blackberry, but perhaps a BlackBerry Pearl and this tablet would be the killer combo. Let the BB do what it does best, which is not a whole heck of a lot (wireless email and calendar), but still crucial items to daily business life. The n810 would be for everything else- browsing, mobile IM, sporadic VNC sessions to fix mail servers, etc. I could probably get by without my laptop on the weekends if I had this setup.

If you're not familar with the n810, some of the key features include:

• 4.13-inch 800 x 480, 65k color display
• GPS
• 2GB internal storage
• WiFi (802.11b/g)
• Bluetooth (2.0+ EDR) DUNs to capable phones
• 400MHz OMAP 2420 CPU, 128MB RAM, 256MB ROM
• Integrated frontal camera, ambient light sensor, mini USB 2.0, hardware lock switch
• Plays back video: 3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1/4, Real video; audio: MP3, WMA, AAC, AMR, AWB, M4A, MP2, Real audio, WAV
• Battery life: 4 hours of "typical use" , 10 hours music only, and up to 2 weeks totally idle time, and 5 days active standby
• Runs Nokia's Linux Maemo interface
• 5 x 2.83 x 0.55-inches, 7.97 ounces
• Full Keyboard

Not a bad little kit for under $500 ($479 MSRP). And keep in mind there are no contracts, no carrier lock-in, no crazy-ass hacks needed just to load a simple app. The possibilites are endless for user-developed apps and extenstions. Set to launch in November, hopefully it will be under the tree in December.

Through a partnership with Boingo wireless, $8/mo will get you access to all Boingo WiFi hotspots with your N810. While some sort of built-in cellular broadband (EVDO, EDGE, etc) would be nice, the lack of needing a carrier contract is a bigger plus, at least to me. It will probably be possible to use the tethered access of my Blackberry to get online, or perhaps use my USB720 EVDO card as an Internet connection when no WiFi is available.

What are your thoughts? Is this the killer device, or just a still-born toy?

I had a need to create a linux proxy server that could accept incoming proxy connections on multiple IP addresses *and* control the outgoing IP address that would be used to download the data from the remote webserver.

I started out using Apache2 as my proxy server. It took all of about 5 minutes to setup Apache as a proxy server. This basically consisted of adding the following lines in my httpd.conf:

This worked fine for the first/default IP. But didn't go as expected when I bound additional IP's to eth0.

The default behavior of linux is for the kernel to use the IP address that is "closest" to the default gateway. This meant that while I could listen on multiple IP's, all the remote connections were done on behalf of my "main" IP address. Not exactly what I wanted.

So, some mailing-list questions and googling later, I came across an option for mod_proxy - "ProxySourceAddress". ProxySourceAddress allows you (in theory) to specify the source IP that Apache would use to make its outgoing connection to the remote website. Unfortuneately, ProxySourceAddress doesn't seem to be available by default, and I didn't feel like messing arond with patching apache.. yadda yadda.

So, I looked into squid as a proxy server instead. Squid supports ACL-based proxy rules, covering a variety of different options. Using the "myip" ACL in conjuntion with tcp_outgoing_address, i could map any source IP to any outgoing IP address.

First, setup a batch of ACL's:

acl ip2 myip 10.1.1.2

acl ip3 myip 10.1.1.3

acl ip4 myip 10.1.1.4

And so on. The "myip" acl option tells squid to reconize the IP address that the remote client connected on. Don't confuse this with the "src" ACL option. "src" specifies the originating IP of the client connecting to the proxy server. You can use this to base various squid behaviors on the remote client making the proxy request.

Once your myip ACL's are setup, use tcp_outgoing_address to specify which IP you want squid/linux to use to make the request to the remote server:

tcp_outgoing_address 10.1.1.2 ip2

tcp_outgoing_address 10.1.1.3 ip3

tcp_outgoing_address 10.1.1.4 ip4

Once these rules are in place in your squid.conf file, restart squid and test things out. You should be able to make the connection to your squid server on any of your configured IP's, and have the outgoing connection to the remote server originate on the IP of your choosing.

Need some help getting squid to utilize multiple IPs, or do other interesting things?  Feel free to post a comment/question.