Kevin Hakanson's questions

I'm a developer and not a sysadmin, so I'm going to ask this question the best I can.

I am working on a web application for mobile devices. Since it is in development, it is only available on our internal network. The WiFi access points at my company are for "guest use" and get a connection that is outside the corporate firewall. Employees that use the WiFi need to use VPN in to access the corporate network.

I have mobile devices with WiFi that I want to connect to my internal network for testing my web application. Not all of them have VPN capability.

Here is my question: How can I set up a WiFi access point and only allow it to route traffic to a white list of the IP addresses of my web servers? Can this be an off the shelf wireless router or does it need to be a server with wifi card?

I don't want to set up a rogue endpoint and compromise corporate security, so I plan on going through my IT department, but I want to go to them informed of the possibilities.

I have seen a lot of interesting references to Varnish and would like to play with it. However, I run Windows XP and don't have an extra machine available to run linux, nor do I have much linux skill. I would like to install linux under some virtualization software so I can evaluate Varnish and it's VCL.

Any way to run Linux as a Virtual Machine on top of Windows so can have best of both worlds? gave me some good tips. I am fine with using either Virtual PC (which I use now) or VirtualBox (which seems like a good choice). Any recommendations on which of these to use?

Next, which linux distro makes the most sense. I don't really need a desktop version if I just want to play with a networking level application. I'd prefer something that didn't take up much disk space and was either easy to setup, or even already mostly setup on a virtual hard drive. Something that had Varnish and any dependencies installed would be the best option.

We're running Windows Vista Enterprise as a guest OS under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (6.0.192.0) (running on Windows XP Professional host). Our development workstations have multiple monitors, including a widescreen that supports 1680 x 1050. The developers like to run the guest OS in full screen by using the right alt-enter feature and be able to maximize the screen real estate.

However, when I go to Control Panel > Personalization > Display Settings to change my resolution, I don't have 1680 x 1050 as an option: it goes from 1600 x 1024 to 1600 x 1200. The monitor is reported as "(Default Monitor) on VM Additions S3 Trio32/64", which matches the emulated video card from Virtual PC. The 1600 x 1024 setting leaves an area of the screen unused.

I think I could edit C:\Windows\inf\monitor.inf to add the new resolution, probably under the [Generic.NTx86] (Monitor\Default_Monitor is the hardware device ID for legacy descriptor-less monitors.). However, I'm not sure exactly what to change. Switching from Virtual PC to VMWare Workstation or another product is not an option.