5 ms·

That is awful and why I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Just yesterday I had a similar issue with Resharper, where our local l

by koyote 6y ago

That is awful and why I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Just yesterday I had a similar issue with Resharper, where our local licence server was down for the day. Luckily I was able to enable a 30-day trial. (and I guess Resharper isn't that mandatory to get work done)

simonblack 6y ago
I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Me too. After a disastrous episode with DropBox while travelling in foreign countries nearly a decade ago, I instituted my own File Server that's accessible via the Internet. All of my data is 'safe at home' with daily backups.
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  How do you secure it from unwanted access? I have been wanting to do something similar but I am unsure of the best practices
  - tiagobraw 6y ago
    build a home vpn with self signed certificates
  - Jedd 6y ago
    Either sftp/ssh with key-only logins (ie. no passwords), or Syncthing (depending on the volume of data, rate of changes, speed and costs of your network transits) I now keep my primary 'work' and 'private' collections (10-30g each) and a large shared set (350g) synced across desktop & laptop, and also 3 off-site archive servers, using Syncthing. This includes a literal satellite connection for one site. [0] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Not sure if it's a "best practice", but you can get a fairly Dropbox'ish experience by running a nextcloud/owncloud instance. It even comes in docker containers, so setup is quite simple.
  - jve 6y ago
    After setting up HTTPS, always being updated, introduce port knocking for HTTPS port : https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-port-knocking-to-hide-your-ssh-daemon-from-attackers-on-ubuntu https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-... Its less of a hassle to use something like nginx reverse proxy docker container in front of your web services, as it comes preconfigured with some best practices regarding TLS. (TLS1.2+ only by default) https://hub.docker.com/r/jwilder/nginx-proxy https://hub.docker.com/r/jwilder/nginx-proxy If you use docker, be sure to google around how to manage firewall with containers (must use DOCKER-USER chain instead of INPUT) Ofcourse, you will get a bit involved in setup step if you choose to tie nginx proxy, letsenccrypt and nextcloud containers. But search engine is your friend.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    You could take a look at nextcloud. Seems promising, but I have just rudimentary experience. Does what I want though.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  > a disastrous episode with DropBox while travelling in foreign countries nearly a decade ago What was that? They cut your access because you logged from a different IP?
  - simonblack 6y ago
    It was probably my fault in configuration, however the idea was to have a DropBox whereby I could put in files while travelling with my laptop and those files would be taken up with my home server. Except that it worked in reverse. My laptop was 'emptier' than the home server, so the home server's files were deleted to match the laptop. Hundreds of megabytes of files were destroyed before I managed to stop it. On top of that, I only had a 2 gig per month quota for internet access while travelling, and all the DropBox activity soon exhausted that in days. On later trips my own home server coped very well, with less overall unwanted activity.
neolog 6y ago
> That is awful and why I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Because you're less likely to brick your IDE than Microsoft is?
- koyote 6y ago
  I don't think I've ever 'bricked' my IDE. How does one go about bricking an IDE?
  - sixdimensional 6y ago
    Welcome to Visual Studio, the home of updates that take hours to install and sometimes end up bricking your IDE. To be fair, that hasn't happened in a pretty long time for me - but in the earlier days it was commonplace. It used to be bleeding edge features that would do it, other times it was just because they took so long, that interrupting the process of upgrading or installing caused a mess. Or installing the newest version alongside the older version, etc. Visual Studio is a massive and complex creature (much like other "big IDEs", such as Eclipse) - although it has become much more streamlined in more recent releases - considering how complex it is. EDIT: To be clear, problems often involved corruption of registry values, library/DLL hell, small database or configuration files and caches, etc. that happened with Visual Studio in the scenarios above.
    - koyote 6y ago
      Yeah I have been using VS for nearly a decade now but I've never 'bricked' it. Sure, sometimes installing new versions alongside old versions could cause issues. But that's a managed process that one team member would do before the whole team migrated and any issues would be worked out during that stage. (one of our old upgrade steps was to install 2015 before 2013 because doing it the other way around would break something in 2013; 2013 still being needed for some projects). I have never been in the situation where the entire company (or even entire team) was locked out of their IDE.
    - ironman1478 6y ago
      Just to back this up, I've also bricked my VS installation multiple times when I worked in that environment. However, some of that was self inflicted when I was trying to figure out how to restore older sub versions of vs 2019 before they started publishing the manifests publicly. Also, while this isn't bricking the IDE, you can definitely ruin solutions & project files in a very hard to debug way if you ever need to manually update those files.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Me too. Got a few instances of similar situations with Datagrip and really wish we had local license instead of license server.
- darthg0d 6y ago
  All JetBrains products support using a license key instead of using the JetBrains account.
OkGoDoIt 6y ago
It used to be you bought a key to unlock it permanently, but nowadays it ties your license to your Microsoft account. There’s a link to “unlock with a product key“, but I have no idea how you get one of those. I hate renting software rather than owning it, but also VS2019 is where I’m most productive so I put up with it. This isn’t even the first time this has happened. I do most of my development on my desktop computer, sometimes I go long stretches without using my laptop. More than once I opened up my laptop on a flight to try and get some coding work done, but surprise, license is expired and I don’t have any connectivity to renew it. Absolutely ridiculous.
- andi999 6y ago
  Whats the difference for you between VS2017 and VS2019?
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Time travel (reverse) debugging is a killer feature and only available for 2019 onwards. Prior to that you have to use their "IntelliTrace" stuff, which isn't nearly as good.
  - orloffm 6y ago
    Also small things around .net core stuff - better UI for project settings, built-in converter for packages.config etc.
    - retox 6y ago
      >small things around .net core stuff I don't think you can target core 3.0+ at all in VS2017, and only 3.1 is supported now. What that means for security updates I don't know.
- DevoidSimo 6y ago
  You used to be able to get keys for all windows software through an MSDN account. No idea if that's still the case, would have been around 2017 last time I had one.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
If you logon to the JetBrains site you can download an activation code for offline use.

by koyote 6y ago

simonblack 6y ago

I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Me too. After a disastrous episode with DropBox while travelling in foreign countries nearly a decade ago, I instituted my own File Server that's accessible via the Internet. All of my data is 'safe at home' with daily backups.

drevil-v2 6y ago
How do you secure it from unwanted access? I have been wanting to do something similar but I am unsure of the best practices
- tiagobraw 6y ago
  build a home vpn with self signed certificates
- Jedd 6y ago
  Either sftp/ssh with key-only logins (ie. no passwords), or Syncthing (depending on the volume of data, rate of changes, speed and costs of your network transits) I now keep my primary 'work' and 'private' collections (10-30g each) and a large shared set (350g) synced across desktop & laptop, and also 3 off-site archive servers, using Syncthing. This includes a literal satellite connection for one site. [0] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- microtherion 6y ago
  Not sure if it's a "best practice", but you can get a fairly Dropbox'ish experience by running a nextcloud/owncloud instance. It even comes in docker containers, so setup is quite simple.
- jve 6y ago
  After setting up HTTPS, always being updated, introduce port knocking for HTTPS port : https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-port-knocking-to-hide-your-ssh-daemon-from-attackers-on-ubuntu https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-... Its less of a hassle to use something like nginx reverse proxy docker container in front of your web services, as it comes preconfigured with some best practices regarding TLS. (TLS1.2+ only by default) https://hub.docker.com/r/jwilder/nginx-proxy https://hub.docker.com/r/jwilder/nginx-proxy If you use docker, be sure to google around how to manage firewall with containers (must use DOCKER-USER chain instead of INPUT) Ofcourse, you will get a bit involved in setup step if you choose to tie nginx proxy, letsenccrypt and nextcloud containers. But search engine is your friend.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  You could take a look at nextcloud. Seems promising, but I have just rudimentary experience. Does what I want though.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
> a disastrous episode with DropBox while travelling in foreign countries nearly a decade ago What was that? They cut your access because you logged from a different IP?
- simonblack 6y ago
  It was probably my fault in configuration, however the idea was to have a DropBox whereby I could put in files while travelling with my laptop and those files would be taken up with my home server. Except that it worked in reverse. My laptop was 'emptier' than the home server, so the home server's files were deleted to match the laptop. Hundreds of megabytes of files were destroyed before I managed to stop it. On top of that, I only had a 2 gig per month quota for internet access while travelling, and all the DropBox activity soon exhausted that in days. On later trips my own home server coped very well, with less overall unwanted activity.

neolog 6y ago

> That is awful and why I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud. Because you're less likely to brick your IDE than Microsoft is?

koyote 6y ago
I don't think I've ever 'bricked' my IDE. How does one go about bricking an IDE?
- sixdimensional 6y ago
  Welcome to Visual Studio, the home of updates that take hours to install and sometimes end up bricking your IDE. To be fair, that hasn't happened in a pretty long time for me - but in the earlier days it was commonplace. It used to be bleeding edge features that would do it, other times it was just because they took so long, that interrupting the process of upgrading or installing caused a mess. Or installing the newest version alongside the older version, etc. Visual Studio is a massive and complex creature (much like other "big IDEs", such as Eclipse) - although it has become much more streamlined in more recent releases - considering how complex it is. EDIT: To be clear, problems often involved corruption of registry values, library/DLL hell, small database or configuration files and caches, etc. that happened with Visual Studio in the scenarios above.
  - koyote 6y ago
    Yeah I have been using VS for nearly a decade now but I've never 'bricked' it. Sure, sometimes installing new versions alongside old versions could cause issues. But that's a managed process that one team member would do before the whole team migrated and any issues would be worked out during that stage. (one of our old upgrade steps was to install 2015 before 2013 because doing it the other way around would break something in 2013; 2013 still being needed for some projects). I have never been in the situation where the entire company (or even entire team) was locked out of their IDE.
  - ironman1478 6y ago
    Just to back this up, I've also bricked my VS installation multiple times when I worked in that environment. However, some of that was self inflicted when I was trying to figure out how to restore older sub versions of vs 2019 before they started publishing the manifests publicly. Also, while this isn't bricking the IDE, you can definitely ruin solutions & project files in a very hard to debug way if you ever need to manually update those files.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Me too. Got a few instances of similar situations with Datagrip and really wish we had local license instead of license server.

darthg0d 6y ago
All JetBrains products support using a license key instead of using the JetBrains account.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago

It used to be you bought a key to unlock it permanently, but nowadays it ties your license to your Microsoft account. There’s a link to “unlock with a product key“, but I have no idea how you get one of those. I hate renting software rather than owning it, but also VS2019 is where I’m most productive so I put up with it. This isn’t even the first time this has happened. I do most of my development on my desktop computer, sometimes I go long stretches without using my laptop. More than once I opened up my laptop on a flight to try and get some coding work done, but surprise, license is expired and I don’t have any connectivity to renew it. Absolutely ridiculous.

andi999 6y ago
Whats the difference for you between VS2017 and VS2019?
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Time travel (reverse) debugging is a killer feature and only available for 2019 onwards. Prior to that you have to use their "IntelliTrace" stuff, which isn't nearly as good.
- orloffm 6y ago
  Also small things around .net core stuff - better UI for project settings, built-in converter for packages.config etc.
  - retox 6y ago
    >small things around .net core stuff I don't think you can target core 3.0+ at all in VS2017, and only 3.1 is supported now. What that means for security updates I don't know.
DevoidSimo 6y ago
You used to be able to get keys for all windows software through an MSDN account. No idea if that's still the case, would have been around 2017 last time I had one.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

If you logon to the JetBrains site you can download an activation code for offline use.