I have an interesting article for my readers this week. For those who don't already know me, I am a student studying Computer Science at DWIT, currently in the fourth semester. This semester is going bad for me since there are a lot of assignments each day and I barely get free time. Thanks to the weekends that let me connect with my readers. In this article, I will explain how I saved my life (:p) with the help of technology. Here, the story begins.

I had an assignment of Cognitive Science which I had completed in my laptop at home and had even made a copy of the file to my pendrive. When at college, I realized that I didn't bring the pendrive along with me and hence I was in trouble. I am a Linux user and hence have OpenSSH ­server setup in my laptop already and have also configured my router's settings to forward port 22 to my device's IP. I have static public IP which I've rot already.

I called my mom and asked her to press the power button of my laptop and leave it as it is. Next, I borrowed a laptop from my friend at college. It was running Windows. I downloaded putty.exe from putty.org which is an SSH and telnet client for Windows.

I opened putty.exe and provided my laptop's public IP and specified port 22, checked SSH and clicked open, which asked me for login credentials of my laptop.

After providing correct credentials, I was able to remotely access my laptop from my college. What next? Now I need to find the assignment file and get it. How?

Here's what I did. For finding the location of my file, I simply listed each directory with Linux command ls and found it inside /home/bhishan/lispcognitive.odt

I then needed the file with me in my college. I planned to send it as an attachment via email. For this python was a good option. So, I opened python interactive shell using command

python

Here's the snapshot of the codes I used to send an email with an attachment.

After this, I remotely shut down my laptop using the following command

sudo shutdown -h now 

Next, I opened my email, found the attachment and quickly printed it out and submitted like a geek.

To get to know more on how to configure all these, follow the given link: [http://www.thetaranights.com/]

(Author Biography: Bhishan Bhandari is a DWIT student currently studying in the fourth semester.)