Setting up isolated interfaces can seem like a lot of work that has relatively little point, butthere is at least one important case for them: management interfaces onmachines that route traffic.

Consider your typical garden variety routing firewall. Let us assumethat you do not want to make it directly accessible on its outsiderouter IP, because then the outside world could attack it, or any of itsnormal inside IPs, because then compromised machines inside your networkcould attack it. So you give it a connection to your management

We're not interested in the Eee as anything approaching a conventionallaptop; we're interested in it as what I'll call a sysadmin's walkaroundmachine, something I can take with me to get access to our real machines,troubleshoot problems, and plug into hardware. The Eee is appealing forthis primarily because it is really cheap and runs Linux; that it is alsosmall and light is an extra benefit.

(We care about really cheap because it makes it feasible to buy everyonetheir own

I'm quite familiar with Firefox's weird remote control because I've been exploiting it for years inmy peculiar environment (enough years that when I started doing it, Iwas using Netscape Navigator instead). As you might guess, the overallgoal of my environment is to keep the browser running all the time,because back in the days when I started doing this the browser startedeven more slowly than it does now.

To stay running, Firefox needs to have a window open, so I keep