Online course

* Warning - only of interest to the geeks among you! *

I started taking an online teaching course about Security in Linux recently. There's about 8 people in total taking the course spread out across the world. I'm in Hong Kong, some of my class mates are in Australia and elsewhere, but the teacher is from the States.

We all chat via a program called Team Speak - www.goteamspeak.com which works on either Linux or Windows. We all get to see the teachers 'lecture notes' via a program called Tight VNC - www.tightvnc.com that lets you view someone else's desktop, again it works on either Linux or Windows - which is very useful. The cool thing is that we are using PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html) to login in to several computers including one to do labs on.

We're using Microsoft Virtual PC to load an entire linux distribution from a single file on my PC and display it on my desktop while Windows it running. Its very neat because it gets it own space to live on the machine with its own ip address so I can SSH into the 'virtual' linux from any other box, even though that machine is not really running linux.

Anyway, this online course is neat, technologically wise and cause I'm learning loads about routing packets through firewalls and auditing.