Best way to do remote development?

[Charles Curley]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:25:19 -0800
"S. Dale Morrey" <sdalemorrey at gmail.com> wrote:

> I do quite a bit of software development and now I've picked up some
> clients that would like me to travel rather frequently to meet them.
> This has got me in the market for a new laptop, but I don't have a lot
> of extra money right now.

Can't help there. Sorry.

> My older laptop would be just fine except that it doesn't have the
> power to run a modern full blown development environment.

Can't help there, either.

> The other problem with traveling with a laptop (especially a new one),
> is that if it gets stolen you lose all your files.

That's what encrypted USB sticks and rsync, and rsync over SSH, are for.

Another problem with traveling with a laptop is that Customs agencies
around the world are inclined to make a snapshot of your hard drive
without your knowledge or permission. Including US Customs. Full hard
drive encryption is a partial work-around here.

> 
> Personally I think a solution like that would be ideal, but I'm
> worried about security and redundancy etc.
> Can anyone tell me more about my options?  A self managed server would
> be great, but like I said, I know enough to know it was insecure, but
> not enough to know how I should properly secure it and still allow me
> to login from anywhere.

How about SSH into your desktop at home? A bit of scripting lets you
mirror selected files between the desktop and your remote machine. I do
a lot of work with command line/NCURSES programs that way. Full GUI
programs might be a bit slow, depending on where you are. Some hotels
just have very slow networks.


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