Welcome to my office. Please excuse the mess on the desk.
I telecommute from my home and try to get a bit of work done while playing Mr. Mom and taking care of our daughter and son. In addition to some skills as a software engineer, systems engineer and network manager, I've also gotten some good experience on doing the telecommuting thing.
Formerly, my "work" system was a Dell Precision 420, which sat behind a Gnatbox firewall running on an old generic P-100 system with no hard drive and 48MB RAM. I used RedHat Linux 7.2 with various mods and tweaks as my primary OS. I used VMWare which allows me to run a Windows 'virtual machine' under Linux, handy for the few Microsoft-specific applications I was forced to run.
ssh (Secure SHell) was my primary means of communicating back to my company's network. ssh allowed me to open sessions similar to rlogin, rsh or telnet on a remote network -- my company's, in this case. I could also build "tunnels" via ssh, which allowed me to fetch mail from the remote network or run a local Citrix session and connect to a remote Windows NT domain.
The most important part of my old setup was my firewall. I used Gnatbox lite, a freeware firewall from the folks at Gnatbox. Their freeware firewall supports a network of up to five users and performs Network Address Translation (NAT). That means you can have one IP address from your ISP, configure your firewall for that address, and have up to five computers accessing the Internet from behind the firewall, safe and secure from hackers. I highly recommend Gnatbox, even though I don't use it any more.
Here's a diagram of how my network was set up.
These days I do my work on a Dell D600 laptop connected via Cisco's VPN client software. Firewall support is via a Linksys 4-port DSL Router with stateful packet inspection firewall. I still make use of VMware, but more in the aspect of sandbox testing: I can keep a clean system in a virtual machine, copy that to a testbed, install all kinds of crap on it and blow it away. Great tool!
#! /usr/bin/perl
# jpg2thumb.pl
# widget script to create thumbnails from graphics using ImageMagik's convert
# ALL .jpg files in current directory will be processed
# New files <source_file>_thumb.jpg will be created
@list = <*.jpg>;
foreach $item (@list) {
($name, $ext) = split (/\./,$item);
$thumb = $name + "_thumb";
print("/usr/X11R6/bin/convert -geometry 150 $item $name\_thumb.jpg");
system("/usr/X11R6/bin/convert -geometry 150 $item $name\_thumb.jpg");
print "\n";
} # end foreach loop
Here's my .vimrc, the configuration file for Vim.