I spent the end of the afternoon at the office trying to install some software. I'm pleased to say that at long last, I've got VPN working on my Mac! (VPN lets me appear to be on an internal USGS network when I'm not, thereby giving me access in internal-access-only Web pages and letting me use ssh to access the Unix servers.) This will make my life a lot easier when I need to do a quick update or check of something on the server on a Friday or on the weekend, or if I want to participate in a conference call from home. It's also going to be useful when traveling when I'm not going to another USGS office.
I had tried to get VPN to work a couple of years ago, and hit frustration after frustration. After circling around various setup problems, I got to the point when it said everything was working and connected, but with one small problem: I still couldn't access internal pages. The VPN support person for Macs was in Denver and we couldn't troubleshoot it unless I was at home, and I basically gave up after we failed to make contact a couple of times.
But in the intervening years, they've switched to VPN 3000, there have been a couple of Mac OSX upgrades, and it's all better now. I downloaded a "pre-configured client", installed it, put in the secret group password, and then asked for a connection. It asked for my personal login and password, and Bing! it works. I got on the local internal Web page, linked to the timekeeping Web site, and finished my timesheet for the week--forgot to do that before I left the office.
Now to see if the "release candidate: no guarantees" version of OpenAFS for OS 10.4 will let me connect to update Web pages...
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