I just had one of those moments where the technology I am using in such a sanguine manner astounded me.
12 years ago the coolest thing I did as a geek was to work on my machine at home. See, I was doing so while at work using VNC across a 14.4kbps dial-up connection. It was horribly slow but oh-so-cool.
Today I just used VNC in much the same manner. I VNCed into a machine to start my media application so my wife an I can watch videos on the XBox tonight. Except the machine which the VNC client was running was a virtual machine (VM). Its connection is an encrypted VPN tunnel to another machine which is, itself, a VM. From there the connection went to my main home Linux box which is headless so the VNC display is itself virtual. Finally the media application doesn’t run on Linux so I have a WindowsXP VM in which to run it.
Connecting from a VM to VM on a virtual display accessed across a VPN run on a VM intermediary.
Makes me wonder what I’ll be doing with technology in 12 years time.
