VPN is great for working from home or working remotely, however the VPN remote access in Windows XP (or maybe vista) will switch all traffic trough the VPN connection once VPN connection established, that sometimes create some trouble: Internet surf will be much slower, some corporate network setting may not allow access to Internet so normal Internet surf may not work.

This problem can be easily solved by config the route table by yourself. To get a help of “route” simply type “route”:

C:> route

To make things simple, you can dump the route table before connect to VPN:

C:>route print

And dump it again after VPN connection established, from the two route table, you will find out the differents. Here is an example after VPN established:

Active Routes:
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0    172.19.xxx.xx   172.19.xxx.xx       1
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0    192.168.1.126    192.168.1.19       21

… … 

Please notice the first two lines, the metric number will decide the priority of the route selection. (smaller is higer priority)

My only VPN usage is connect to my working computer and using remote desktop, and I have no other requirement to connect to other computers inside the VPN directly. What I did is, add a new route entry for my working PC and make all other destination go through my home router:

c:> route add  65.xx.xxx.xx mask 255.255.255.255 172.19.xxx.xx 

c:> route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.126

65.xx.xx.xx is my working PC IP address, 172.19.xxx.xx is the default gateway of the VPN connection, 192.168.1.126 is my home router local address.

It can be done by a BAT script:

rasdial /disconnect
rasdial “My VPN Connection” “MYDOMAIN\myusername” *
route add  65.xx.xxx.xx mask 255.255.255.255 172.19.xxx.xx  

route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.126

It’s always easy to change the route table as you wish to make the online line much easier, enjoying VPN without having to break the normal Intenet connection.

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Jeremy Zawodny gave a great list of S3 backup tools, Marc Hedlund said S3 is everywhere. However I feel I am still not able to find a good enough S3 application to be able to make S3 a more consumer friendly serivce.

Maybe Jungle Disk is one of the closest one, however Jungle disk seemed have many problem in my Computer, and it’s UI and usability is not as good as I expected.

At this time, the most popular consumer service for S3 is seemed to be used as a backup storage, however I feel S3 can be used to do more. In the amazon’s s3 application list, most of the high ranked application are either web UI or client UI for s3 itself, it’s also common that photo/video startups using S3 as backend storage.

I think what ”a personal storage serveice” can offer is not just a “remote disk”, it can be more, and for the remote storage or online backup, show user a file explorer UI or mount it as a network drive is not the best user friendly design. For me, I hate to copy some large files to a “remote drive” and see a never ending progress bar sitting on my screen and I have no idea when it will end and if it will fail.

There is a very nice backup shareware named “second copy“, it’s nice because backup tasks can be predefine and executed as tasks silencely and will not break even if there is some error happen. Now secondcopy has support FTP storage, I think it will be great if it could support S3 or other online storage.

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