n900, new life....
 

Hi All,

Its been a while since I posted, I'm afraid I was drawn to the dark side and purchased a Samsung Galaxy S2.its a fantastic phone but thats not the point of this thread.

I recently rewired my home network and decided I wanted to get a VPN appliance, but they are amazingly expensive...so I thought about a sheeva plug pc running linux with SSH tunelling...but even though they are small pcs, they are still pretty bulky and expensive.

and then I spied out of the corner of my eye, my N900, gathering dust in my office drawer.

After a good long charge the device booted up, I had already installed ssh so it was ready to go!

I removed all non required apps and settings, IE email accounts and facebook etc.

I then disabled powersaving on the wifi (as that tends to limit incoming connections)

and now it sits there providing me a loverly SSH vpn system, with a full pyhon interpreter (which I have written an automatic easynew downloading tool)

it has lynx on there for an emergency bit of text based browsing.

I also installed X11VNC so I can remote in and control the phone should I need to.

it also acts as a 32GB online storage device, and using truecrypt gives me full encryption of that storage should the device get stolen!

I have a cheap timer plug which switches charging off for a few hours every day to allow the battery to drain.

I'd love to hear others ideas of what I could add?

Thanks

Re: n900, new life....
 

That's very nice indeed, N900 serving well in the afterlife :)

Re: n900, new life....
 

For VNC i find you need to keep the screenlight on, it won't wake up with VNC input (and it doesn't seem to run the server automaticly, i need to start it myself).

Re: n900, new life....
 

yeah I only fire up the service if i'm planning to actually use it. not that I have any use real use for it as all the telephony functions are disabled but it's better to have it and not need it than the other way round.

I'm just looking into the best shell only apps now.

it's certainly woken up my love of llinux again, and its so wierd seeing my n900 screen (via vnc) on my S2,

Re: n900, new life....
 

Nice solution, maybe you could substitute the battery with an adapter connected directly to the battery terminals in order to avoid (dis)charging the battery because the device becomes quite hot when used with active antennas and charger connected (almost mine becomes very hot when used i.e. as 3g-wifi hotspot and charger connected)
Bye!

Re: n900, new life....
 

idea: you could also use it as a wireless music player - plug it into the speaker system and use VLC to play music, and control it via http.

Re: n900, new life....
 

Thats a good idea djdas, at the moment I have the device charge and dischage daily. having the battery in there also has the additional advantage of a built in UPS :)

Re: n900, new life....
 

thats another good idea skykooler, I could freak my wife out by playing music to her while I'm at work :)

Re: n900, new life....
 

You could add more awesome games of yours in the repositories :D

Re: n900, new life....
 

hahaha, nice one HtheB, and thanks for the compliment!