Here’s a tip. Do not, ever, change your password just before going home for the weekend (or worse, for a vacation). When you’re back home, you won’t remember how you spelled it. Or at least if you’re me, you won’t.

The added bonus here is that i need to be on call for work this weekend, and i need my virtual machines on standby. But since my VMs are for Microsoft Virtual PC, a Windows platform that you can get in to would be nice. Or really, would be really, really preferred. But as hinted, i don’t have a Windows box at home that i can log in to.

So what’s a boy on a penguin trip to do? Install VirtualBox. It reads .vhd files natively, without any conversion hoop to jump through. There was a less-than-obvious error message when i started VirtualBox from the K menu, but started from the command line, i got hints on which extra bits and pieces i needed to install. A reboot later, and VirtualBox starts. It reads my VHD file with that Windows XP and the Cisco VPN client on. It starts. It notices some hardware changes (no shit, Watson) which i ignore. I suceesfully start the VPN client and gloriously connect to the customer. I RDP to their server. I feel fine.

I’m well aware that there is a Cisco VPN client for Linux too, which would have been the easier and more logical approach here, but i never really got it installed last time i tried. And half success with installing VPN drivers has caused compleat failure on the network side before, at least on Windows, so i wasn’t really that eager to retry.

But hey, Windows with Cisco VPN, running on Linux. Schweet.