I’ve recently solved a pretty complicated problem for which I didn’t find much information on the Internet. Here is a list of our requirements:
- Maintain a single-login desktop environment (on a laptop) so icons, data, etc are not split between user profiles
- Must be able to connect to two different domains
- Outlook must be able to connect to two different Exchange servers
The situation is this: my boss has a SBS server set up at home, running a family website, Exchange server, and other services. His laptop is taken back and forth from home to work daily. Data is backed up nightly on his home network, which also handles Windows Update synchronization and anti-virus definition updates. He also needs things to work when he’s traveling and not connected to either domain server, but always should be working from a single user profile (eg. not having to manage multiple user accounts).
After a lot of tests and trials, here is the solution we came up with:
- Laptop joins home domain, connects to home Exchange server. The laptop caches passwords, so when he’s not connected to his home domain, he can still log in with his account.
- A VPN connection is configured at work to run over the LAN. This eliminates the need to authenticate yourself whenever accessing domain-protected shares and servers. Since it runs at LAN speed, you never really notice it being slow despite the extra overhead.
- Outlook is configured with two different profiles, one for each Exchange server (home and work). The choice of profiles is made at Outlook startup.
This is a good solution to our problem. Since his updates and backups happen at home, the laptop is joined to that domain. The LAN VPN connection works fast in the office and keeps him from having to re-authenticate himself every time he wants access to a network folder. All of his email is accessible from Outlook, with the only drawback of having to choose a profile when Outlook starts. He is able to use the same user profile on the computer to accomplish all of this.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find much information about people doing this anywhere. I would think there are some people in the same situation out there. Perhaps I just didn’t use the right search terms. In any case, I present this solution and welcome suggestions to make it better.
I had a need to convert some audio samples from m4a to a “more widely available” format in Linux. Here’s how I did it:
mplayer -ao pcm file.m4a -ao pcm:file=newfile.wav
lame -h -b 256 newfile.wav newfile.mp3
Real simple, like it should be.