Remote Radius Server Groups

Mobile Communication Off The Beaten Track for Rural Australians and Travellers

The falling cost of satellite phones and GPS tracker devices is making it easier for travellers to places off the beaten track to call, SMS, tweet and facebook their friends and family about their trip as well as contacting emergency services if they get into trouble.

However this raises a troubling question. If the purpose of going to remote places is to be far from the maddening crowds and noise of city life does the availability of affordable communications technologies to adventurers on our largest oceans, most arid deserts and highest mountains mean there is nowhere left on Earth where we can relax in quiet solitude?

I’m not the only one pondering this issue as I discovered when reading a blog post by William Levins :

“So now you can climb to the top of the world…and still get a telephone call. Wow. This is a wonderful use of technology…and an abysmal failure too. Of course, if you’re a lost or trapped climber…then having the ability to make a cell phone call for help…well that’s terrific … But the opposite is true. The majestic peak of Mount Everest is now no longer a refuge from today’s modern world. Yup, you could climb for weeks, be one of a few thousand to reach the summit…and as you marvel at the expanse of the world before your eyes….ring, ring…you’d get a call. Seems to taint the experience a bit”.

The Spot 2 unit itself costs $229 and needs a $US115/yr satellite service subscription to activate basic functions and an optional US$49.99/yr to activate Google Maps tracking.

People planning a 4WD exploration trip or travelling to a remote place on land should consider buying a Spot 2 as it provides more flexibility than an EPIRB beacon (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) which is only useful in emergency situations and can’t send reassuring location details to friends/family just to say where you are and that you’re OK.

Satellite phones are commonly used by travellers to remote places and the people who live there as the main method of phone communications. When Inmarsat sent me an iSatphone Pro satellite phone to borrow and review during my trip I was surprised at several aspects. I expected it to be big, heavy and thought the phone and usage costs would be quite expensive.

However surprisingly the phone handset is not huge, comparable to an early generation cordless home phone and the cost of buying a iSatPhone Pro in Australia at $599+GST plus call costs @ 75c+GST/min (regardless of country/phone type) is quite comparable to the cost of buying a mid-high end 3G smartphone on a prepaid account.

RD Gateway using NPS and NAP (Network Access Protection)

As you might know the Remote Desktop Gateway (RDGW), which is one of the components of Remote Desktop Services, uses two kinds of policies. Connection Authorization Policies (CAP’s) hold the configuration of who can access resources behind the RDGW. The Resource Authorization Policies (RAP’s) consist of the information of what resources (i.e. servers of farms) can be accessed by users that have an entry in the CAP.In a standard configuration a RDGW uses a local store for its CAP which is based on Network Protection System (NPS) and the configuration of the CAP is done by using the RDGW Manager. In this scenario I wanted to test a Remote Desktop Gateway (RDGW) using a central server running NPS. Why would I want to do this? Most obviously because this way I could create a second RDGW server that would use the same central NPS server for its CAP’s with which I would be able to create a form of High Availability (HA) for my RDGW. But besides this reason, using a central server running NPS I am able to make use of Network Access Protection. With a combination of RDGW and NAP I would be able to set restrictions on the workstations before letting them be able to connect. In other words I can set rules that clients have to be compliant with before I let them through my RDGW. Why is this interesting? When using managed clients (i.e. clients that are members of your domain) you can, of course, create all kinds of policies to enable firewall, virus scanning etc. But what about those non-managed clients? The term bring your own device (BYOD) is becoming more and more popular. A good evolution because why would you still want to manage client machines if all they access is some kind of cloud service (in the broadest sense of the word, a RemoteApp that runs behind your RDGW)? Using RDGW and NAP together you can define a compliance policy so that you can enforce that only clients that are compliant may connect. These compliance policies can include i.e. Our goal: Set an environment in which the Windows 7 client can only connect to the RDSH via the RDGW when the Windows Firewall is running on the Windows 7 client. And, on top of that, perform an auto-remediation on the client by automatically enabling the Windows Firewall if it’s not running and inform the client that he’s now compliant. Sounds like a lot of work, but it will turn out to be surprisingly easy! And these are just the basics!

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