I'm in a spot of a pickle at the moment with a job I'm working on.
It involves an embedded system sending and receiving data from a server via GPRS modem (and I'm doing the embedded bit.) Now normally I'd plok a spare PC on the network in my workshop, open a port to it in my router to the wide world and setup whatever test scripts I needed on it to monitor/test the embedded device.
Now the problem is with the recent bushfires here we lost all copper ADSL lines, so I'm running on a 3G internet service for my main internet connection at the moment. I don't pretend to know much about IT, but apparently the connection for the 3G modems sit in their own VPN (or something) which mean you never get a proper public IP, and therefore you can't setup a server on one (i.e. it's impossible to initiate a connection from a remote device to an device sitting on a 3G internet connection.)
So I'm after any idea's for how I might get around this issue for development. Again, my IT knowledge isn't that great (due to lack of interest) but a bit of googling has turned up something called a VPS (virtual private server.) Does anyone know what the low down is? Is it pretty much a virtual machine with a clean linux install you can SSH into and install what you want (in my case, a LAMP install and probably some python scripts.) Or any better ideas?
Thanks