programmers have a mentality that crashing is a horrible answer to a bug. In a previous lifetime I wrote router software professionally. When you develop routers you're usually under time pressure because the profit margins are very small and time to market is important. As a consequence bugs that are related to long uptimes are difficult to locate(lots of data flowing through, wedged hardware, memory leaks).
The heart of the problem is the difficulty in the industry to get agreement between those who are time driven and those who are quality driven. If you're motivated by time to market you're going to put pressure on your engineering staff to cut quality, if you're motivated by quality you're going to put pressure on those who are time driven. I've met very few software engineers who are comfortable addressing out these balances in developing quality software. In my opinion the most beneficial technical mechanism is to create watchdogs that force reboots the router when things go wrong.
...long story short, since as a customer you don't have much say in how the software/hardware are developed. You do however have an option that fixes the vast majority of all problems - put your router on a christmas tree timer. In the middle of the night have your router (and cable box for that matter) power cycle for five minutes. I'll bet you'll be a much happier surfer
I feel safer if I'm able to get terminal services to work on the public computer. I tend to use the terminal services ActiveX control. for better security I wonder if you could get a SecurID so you dont have to type in a password on the machine being TS'ed into.
if you do this keep in mind that using the SecurID you can get into your private computer safely but any key presses will be logged, so you'll need to be careful when you type in passwords from the safe computer. To get around that consider using roboform on your safe computer - this program will let you click a button causing the forms on the safe computer to be populated. you wont have to type in the passwords using the compromised keyboard
I'm a huge fan of Microsofts foldershare (http://foldershare.com). It's free and does a great job for my needs. It's not 100% what you want - the basic idea is that all files are copied to all your computers. When you make a change (on or offline) FolderShare detects the change notification. Once it's able to communicate again with the FolderShare server in the sky it syncs your data with all connected computers.
do note that even though there is a server in the sky this server doesnt hold copies of your data, its just there for relay - so that you can get to your files even if you've got firewalls on all sides.
my family uses this quite a bit - my Mom has a folder on her desktop named "Chris' Computer" we use this folder as a place to share pictures and other files too large for email.
sharing your favorites/my documents is also wicked cool - your laptop, server, and desktop all have the same files
-CG
one option to consider is waiting a few months for Windows Home Server - one of its key features is a new technology named "Drive Extender". The idea is you make a pool of disks (1394/SATA/IDE/SCSI/USB2/etc). This pool is exposed as one drive letter. You can remove disks as you choose a and even cooler is that you can mix drives of various sizes. You can even remove a disk without causing a blue screen or massive corruption (you should still try to be friendly when you remove disks - yanking them out can be dangerous.. just not nearly as much as RAID strips).
The data on the disks can be duplicated if you want, just choose a share and select the duplicated attribute. Once selected Home Server will make sure there are always two copies located on two different disks.
Slashdot Mirror
programmers have a mentality that crashing is a horrible answer to a bug. In a previous lifetime I wrote router software professionally. When you develop routers you're usually under time pressure because the profit margins are very small and time to market is important. As a consequence bugs that are related to long uptimes are difficult to locate(lots of data flowing through, wedged hardware, memory leaks). The heart of the problem is the difficulty in the industry to get agreement between those who are time driven and those who are quality driven. If you're motivated by time to market you're going to put pressure on your engineering staff to cut quality, if you're motivated by quality you're going to put pressure on those who are time driven. I've met very few software engineers who are comfortable addressing out these balances in developing quality software. In my opinion the most beneficial technical mechanism is to create watchdogs that force reboots the router when things go wrong.
...long story short, since as a customer you don't have much say in how the software/hardware are developed. You do however have an option that fixes the vast majority of all problems - put your router on a christmas tree timer. In the middle of the night have your router (and cable box for that matter) power cycle for five minutes. I'll bet you'll be a much happier surfer
I feel safer if I'm able to get terminal services to work on the public computer. I tend to use the terminal services ActiveX control. for better security I wonder if you could get a SecurID so you dont have to type in a password on the machine being TS'ed into. if you do this keep in mind that using the SecurID you can get into your private computer safely but any key presses will be logged, so you'll need to be careful when you type in passwords from the safe computer. To get around that consider using roboform on your safe computer - this program will let you click a button causing the forms on the safe computer to be populated. you wont have to type in the passwords using the compromised keyboard
I'm a huge fan of Microsofts foldershare (http://foldershare.com). It's free and does a great job for my needs. It's not 100% what you want - the basic idea is that all files are copied to all your computers. When you make a change (on or offline) FolderShare detects the change notification. Once it's able to communicate again with the FolderShare server in the sky it syncs your data with all connected computers. do note that even though there is a server in the sky this server doesnt hold copies of your data, its just there for relay - so that you can get to your files even if you've got firewalls on all sides. my family uses this quite a bit - my Mom has a folder on her desktop named "Chris' Computer" we use this folder as a place to share pictures and other files too large for email. sharing your favorites/my documents is also wicked cool - your laptop, server, and desktop all have the same files -CG
one option to consider is waiting a few months for Windows Home Server - one of its key features is a new technology named "Drive Extender". The idea is you make a pool of disks (1394/SATA/IDE/SCSI/USB2/etc). This pool is exposed as one drive letter. You can remove disks as you choose a and even cooler is that you can mix drives of various sizes. You can even remove a disk without causing a blue screen or massive corruption (you should still try to be friendly when you remove disks - yanking them out can be dangerous.. just not nearly as much as RAID strips).
The data on the disks can be duplicated if you want, just choose a share and select the duplicated attribute. Once selected Home Server will make sure there are always two copies located on two different disks.
more info can be found here Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server