Fun with PC 방's

While Sue's been visiting Seoul, she's continued her regular day job working for Microsoft. Unfortunately, there appears to be some sort of firewall here at KU that's making her VPN connection back to the corporate network not work (must be a different protocol than GT's, because my VPN connection works). She's mostly just arranged to work on things that didn't need access to their intranet, but the other day she had to access some internal server. So, we marched on down to a local "PC 방" (pronounced sort of like PC-bong), which is basically like a Internet cafe type of place, but more often used for playing games rather than checking your email. These PC joints are actually all over the place. You can use a PC there for about $1 an hour, so I'm not sure how they make enough money to even pay for rent.

In any case, we went inside and asked if we could connect Sue's laptop to their network. After a few minutes of the guy at the front desk half not understanding us, and half just saying "no", he just took us to a computer probably so he wouldn't have to deal with us anymore. So we then managed to get all of the necessary networking information off that box (which was a little tricky because all of the menus were in Korean and whenever the box was connected to the network some full-screen interface would automatically pop up and steal focus from anything else; we eventually managed to kill it and you can see the Windows ipconfig dump in the picture above), unplug its network cable, plug in Sue's laptop, and voila we were on the 'net with no firewall. I'm not sure if they really appreciate us plugging random computers into their network, but it got the job done.