This cannot be stressed enough! I have saved myself considerable aggravation heeding this advice.

If I may add another: always travel with a handful of zip ties. You can fix a lot of life’s problems – from repairing a motorcycle on the side of a road to securing a beach umbrella – with a well deployed zip tie.

Over the years, as much of my career has been in professional services in one form or another, I’ve done a fair amount of travel carrying computing equipment. There have been stretches for several years running where I’d be on the road during the weekdays and then back home for the weekend. In fact, I just got off a plane ~45 minutes ago, will spend ~6 hours here at home, and then will be back at the airport to jump an early morning flight for another week away in a different place.

I think there’s a lot to this. I don’t take huge special precautions just because I’m travelling. I do take different kinds of precautions based on the particular sensitivity of information I might be carrying around on my travel laptops (my main working computer is a very stationary desktop workstation). Most of my travelling is project management/business analysis with limited secret-sauce/disclosure-sensitive information needing to be with me. So the basic thing I’m typically guarding against isn’t so much disclosure as much as it is simply losing access to my needed work products. So I use MFA everywhere possible, I tend to avoid biometric access, I encrypt data a rest (basic effort, not heroic efforts), and ensure that I’m syncing my data to a sufficiently trusted cloud service. Crossing borders, I will typically strip information down to bear minimum required for the trip just because those have a higher risk of highly invasive searches. With good encryption and access to various online storage options… there’s usually a way not to carry data on-device today.

There have been times where I have carried more sensitive information which did carry real disclosure risk where I took extra precautions, but I took those on my non-travelling systems as well because the travel aspect didn’t matter: the information determined my security needs overall.

Finally, I did have a work laptop stolen once from the back office of a large retail store I was travelling to help open. We actually ended up getting it back because I was working in a pretty secure back office (under security cameras, which did catch the act) and the laptop had some very specialized and very, very expensive networking gear (at least for the time) installed into it which apparently was enough to elevate the chargeable offense enough to really pursue. Perhaps the irony is that tomorrow’s trip is taking me back to the city where that happened for the first time since that trip… ~30 years ago :-).

We’re on the road a few months per year, all within the US, sometimes by road, sometimes by air. Our travel locations are often off-grid, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time tweaking the setup.

Key tools:

• Starlink mini
• GLiNET router
• Asus ZenScreen
• NyPhy Air75 v2 Keyboard
• Zerotier

What makes it work for me: the ‘desktop layout’ is the same no matter the location. Dual-screen monitor, mechanical keyboard, screens raised to eye level.

In a house, the ‘monitor stand’ is often a cardboard box.

In the van, the ‘monitor stand’ is some built-in shelves. A bosun’s chair works great and packs small. A 300aH LFP battery is enough to go about a week between recharges.

Everything is synced to a cheap VPS in a datacenter. Sensitive data is encrypted with Yubikey 2FA.

Protip: practice! Take your mobile setup across town for an afternoon and see how it works.

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