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There is a problem with doing things this way. I want my development server to be always on, always available. It does things in the background and sometimes I
by maratd 15y ago
There is a problem with doing things this way. I want my development server to be always on, always available. It does things in the background and sometimes I use it when I'm away from the office.
Yes, you can keep your desktop machine on all the time, but that's a huge power suck. Shut down your desktop when you're not using it. Most development servers just don't need to be that beefy anyway.
A better approach, if you're absolutely committed to virtualization, is to just spin up an instance on Rackspace or Amazon. You'll pay about 10 bucks a month, which is less than you would for keeping your desktop running 24/7. On top of that, if your desktop dies, you won't lose your data.
- dchest 15y agoNot everybody needs to run development server 24/7. Plus, the title and the content of this post is "Replacing a Development VPS with Linux on OSX", and you're suggesting the opposite.
- maratd 15y ago> Not everybody needs to run development server 24/7. Great. Shut down the instance. You pay nothing when it's off. > Plus, the title and the content of this post is ... I know what the article says. I'm telling you it's not a good idea, for the reasons listed above. I do run a few local images here and there, but that's only for situations where I don't have access to the internet.
- zokier 15y agoWhy would you need to have your dev server always-on? I think you are either speaking of different kind of development server or your dev server is doing too much stuff. When I hear development server, I think of box on which I can try out various things which may, or may not blow up. That makes it inherently not always available. Also, I want it to be in a relatively clean state so I know that any problems rising are not side effects of some other thing running on it or anything. And after I finish testing some new stuff, I want to be able to just throw it all away if necessary, without needing to care if there are some other services that may be disturbed.
- maratd 15y ago> When I hear development server, I think of box on which I can try out various things which may, or may not blow up. I'm not always in the office. Sometimes I'm at home. Or on a trip. Or in another country. And I still need to have access to my code, try things, make sure they don't blow up. I suppose I could just use Wake-On-LAN or IPMI, which I do sometimes ... but my development server also doubles as a file server and collects error logs from deployments. Not kosher, I know, but no $$$ for anything else.
- chrischen 15y agoIf you run a VM, then your dev system is portable. You can put it in dropbox, or on a flash drive.
- threedaymonk 15y agoIf you can realistically put a VM image in Dropbox, then I want to live where you live. Where I am (London), that kind of bandwidth is scarce and costly.
- chrischen 15y agoYou can put a copy of it there and it only has to happen once. Dropbox has resumable uploading.
- jmlacroix 15y agoHello, I'm the author of the post. These are all good points, I should have made my goals clearer. I do not use it as a web development machine or something that needs to be always on. I use it as an occasional machine, to compile and test stuff that's not working or unavailable under OSX. I was looking for a powerful and cheap VPS (which is uncommon) when I figured I'd be better served by a headless VM. Another big plus for me is having access to it when there's no connectivity.
- maratd 15y ago> I use it as an occasional machine, to compile and test stuff that's not working or unavailable under OSX. Makes perfect sense in that context.
- mentat 15y agoIf you're mostly looking for headless VM, you should check out Vagrant. It makes setup, teardown, and provisioning pretty straightforward.