5 ms·
Neat! Modern thin-client life is actually pretty good. Connectivity of some kind is ubiquitous enough these days that my computer for the last couple of years h
by davidbanham 5y ago
Neat! Modern thin-client life is actually pretty good. Connectivity of some kind is ubiquitous enough these days that my computer for the last couple of years has been an Arch VM in a local Linode datacenter.
I don't need to fuss with file syncing solutions because I only ever access them from the one machine, I just happen to access that machine remotely. Backups are seamlessly handled by Linode snapshotting my disk every so often. I can happily run little webservers, etc, with pretty decent availability.
The thing that sits on my desk is a second hand, small form factor ThinkCentre I picked up dirt cheap when some corp was done with it. All it needs to do is run a terminal ssh'ed into a Tmux session and a local instance of Firefox. I get basically the same experience whether I'm at my desk, on my iPad or using Blink on my phone.
It's actually made me _less_ concerned about my unreliable broadband connection. If my main link goes down, I just hotspot to the 4G on my phone. The latency is a little worse but the bandwidth isn't actually relevant. All my chonky uploads like build artifacts, docker images, etc, all go direct from my Linode to wherever they need to go. Very civilised.
- edwinyzh 5y agoWhat web server software you run in your VPS, and what resources/control/files your local firefox can access/manage?
- davidbanham 5y agoOh all sorts of things. Mostly it's just a development instance of whatever I'm working on, which is usually something in Go these days. I use Caddy to route to various internal services based on the domain the request comes in on. I use Cloudflare to have a wildcard DNS such that I can just start using anything.vps.example.com and have the traffic show up at my machine. Also other bits and bobs like a Discourse server, photo gallery, etc. My local firefox doesn't do anything fancy back to the VPS. It's just a browser, but it does spend a lot of time accessing the dev instances I'm running on the server. It's nice to be able to easily access my in-progress code over a proper domain, over the proper internet, with proper TLS rather than localhost. Browsers handle localhost differently than real domains and it's handy to shake out those errors early on in a project.
- eatonphil 5y agoI do something similar. One Linode for x86 development and one Ec2 instance for arm64. My home office, work office, and laptop (two Windows, one Mac) all ssh to one of these two and with tmux I pick right back up no matter where I go! I've been doing this for a year or two now and it's much nicer than using local VMs since it takes up less memory and compute on the host (two of which only have 8GB RAM).