Well a few posts back “pc4” was being set up with Debian 10 (buster) as an evaluation computer and that was purely for that purpose and it had my media collection installed in order to evaluate it as a media player. But it does struggle to achieve that role because the hardware is too old and slow to play back videos and so Kodi gives a choppy display in playback.
Since writing therefore a new purpose has arisen for a computer to be on my desk that will be permanently connected to a tethered phone for which purpose the requirement is to have access to the internet for times and reasons that would be outside of the scope of the school’s internet connection which I can currently use for 10 hours per day. However it is still not a solution for times when I want to watch streamed church content from Australia or elsewhere because the volume would blow my data cap relatively quickly. But having that computer on my desktop instead of using the bedroom computer over VNC reflects that I would expect to be using the desktop computer more often and also that the VNC option has proved unreliable because of software crashes and problems getting the software to run as a service. I haven’t seen these issues with VNC on the Win10 computer but I have spent a great deal of time trying to resolve these problems on Bedroompc to no avail.
So the computer will be renamed from “buster” or “pc4” to “ministrypc” as it is being used for ministry work and that work could, at times, run into problems with the school web filtering system and I want to keep this work separate from the use of the school wireless system because of that. This will also provide me with a more convenient option for general internet use outside of the hours that the school wireless is available. The computer will be plugged into the Ubiquiti bridge that I have and this bridge will in turn be able to automatically connect to one of my two phones that can be used in tethered mode to provide the required data connection.
On or about the 21st July I wrote a post highlighting that I had had problems with using a Vodem with various computers to gain access to the internet via my cellular data connection. I blamed the problems I was having at the time on the Vodem as it seemed to be possible to get a direct data connection on the Galaxy Tab Android tablet that I had and this seemed to show the Vodem must be the problem. Subsequently I was able to get the tablet to work which seemed to prove this was the issue. However while I have been able to use the tethered phone on a number of occasions, last evening it would not work at all while the tablet again worked (and is being used to write this post). The fact that this issue keeps occurring with either Vodems or tethered phones suggests rather strongly that Vodafone in actuality does have some kind of system that they use randomly and without notice and subject to their own whims to impose a total obstruction of tethering. This is obviously of considerable concern to me and is something I will have to keep evaluating in coming days to try and work out exactly what is going on as it imposes severe limitations on the work I was expecting to do with this computer that really depends on the tethered connection.
So a couple of days later Vodafone has still not resolved the blocking issue with tethering still being blocked so regrettably the idea I was going to be able to use this computer for ministry is under question at the moment. If I cannot get any sense out of Vodafone I will have to try to find an alternative solution.
At the moment I am still testing out VF but at least the network has been more reliable and ministrypc is able to get onto the internet much more readily. Interesting is that every Linux PC in the house is now running Debian (except for laptops which don’t get used much). So mediapc and even bedroompc are running it now. It is just so much better set up than Xubuntu which is a bit nanny state in so many ways (like in regard to hibernation and using the root account).