Lorin Tackett: An Evil Mad Scientist

they call me mad, but in fact I am actually quite happy.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

SSH, RDP and VPN - Oh My!

I’m definitely no stranger to VM and remoting solutions.

First of all, I need to explain, I have the world’s most craptacular laptop. I bought it knowing full well how crappy it was because my intention was always to use it as a remote control for my more powerful machines. It’s a Pentium III with 512mb RAM. And it runs at a productive speed using Ubuntu as its operating system.

My desktop is much better, an AMD64 with a 1.5gb RAM, and a huge external harddrive. It’s a lot more powerful, but hardly portable.

So, these days I VPN to a server half a continent away for work and run several SSH tunnels to get to the development and production machines I work on. I run Linux as my host operating system on my desktop and laptop, and run Windows XP in a network-bridged VM.

When I work at a coffee shop or somewhere other than home, I SSH to my home machine and run several SeamlessRDP sessions to have a unified experience with my applications on the VM. I use VNC to connect to the main desktop to access mail and run other applications.

This is perfect for me because no matter where I am in the world, so long as I have my laptop and a connection to the net, my development environment stays pretty much the same.