Tips

How to get free 2 GB of data on each line for Life on Verizon Wireless for about $40

Verizon Wireless is running a promo until 1/6/2016, that will give you 2 GB of free data for life if you are on an XL plan or larger, and you upgrade an existing device or add a new device.

Here’s how to you can take advantage of this promo and add the 2 GB of bonus data per line for life by spending about $50, even if you don’t have an upgrade available. To me, $40 for 2 GB of data per month for life is more than worth it.

Here’s how:

  • “Upgrade” your device to the cheapest smartphone available. Right now for me it would be the Droid Mini. The full price is $108.
  • If you are ordering online, make sure the confirmation page says you are getting 2 GB data bonus. If via a Verizon rep, confirm with her/him.
  • Activate the new Droid Mini.
  • Wait a day or two, and reactive your original phone, and sell the Droid Mini on eBay or the marketplace of your choice. You should get about $90 for it.
  • Total cost to you, excluding shipping, etc is about $40.

Disclaimer: while I believe this to work based on my own experience and available information. I cannot warranty that this will work for you.

Make all of your home servers reachable by Remote Desktop

If you have more than one servers/PCs running at home behind the internet router, you can normally set up the router port forwarding to forward Remote Desktop traffic to just one server. However, by assigning different incoming ports for different servers, you can connect to each server individually.

Basically, use a different port for each server. Then configure the port forwarding on the router to router each port to the appropriate server on 3389. This assumes that your router supports different ranges for external and internal ports.

For example, for my home setup, I use three different port numbers for the 3 servers I have at home:

RemoteDesktopPortForwarding

By using non-standard ports, there’s also a side benefit of a little extra security.

In Remote Desktop Client, you would add the port number to the Computer name like this:

RemoteDesktopClient

 

Happy Remote Desktoping!

Using Wake On LAN to remotely wake up my Windows 8 server

What I did:

  • Under Network Properties, Power Management, check “Allow this device to wake the computer” and “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”.
  • Under Advanced tab, make sure “Wake on Magic Packet” and “Wake on pattern match” are enabled.
  • On the Internet router, forward port 9 to the server.
  • Use “Wol Wake on Lan” Android app to wake up server.
Back To Top