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I don't have to use TeamViewer, though I very occasionally have to use Windows RDP. You can transfer any kind of file over ssh. scp, sftp, rsync will all copy
by gregjor 2y ago
I don't have to use TeamViewer, though I very occasionally have to use Windows RDP.
You can transfer any kind of file over ssh. scp, sftp, rsync will all copy binaries. Mainly the issues come down to policy and billable time. Many of my customers simply don't allow installing anything on their servers without a tedious approval process. Even if I can install things I might spin my wheels trying to get it to work in an environment I don't have root privileges on, with no one willing to help, and I can't bill for that time. I don't work for free to get an editor installed. I use the tools I know I can find on any Linux/BSD server.
With some customers I have root privileges and manage the server for them. With others their IT dept has rules I have to follow (I freelance) if I want to keep a good relationship. Since I juggle multiple customers and environments I find it simpler not having to manage different editors and environments, so I mostly stick with the defaults. I do have a .profile and .vimrc I copy around if allowed to, that's about it.
I can't lose time/money and possibly goodwill whining about not having everything just-so for me. I recently worked on a server over ssh that didn't have tmux installed. Fortunately it did have screen, and I can use that too, no big deal. I spent less than 60 seconds figuring that out and getting to work rather than wasting hours of non-billable time annoying someone about how I needed tmux installed.
- kragen 2y agoi see, thanks! wrt rdp, i feel like rdp is actually better than vnc or x11-over-ssh, but for cases where regular ssh works, i'd rather use ssh i wasn't thinking in terms of installing tmux, more like a self-contained binary that doesn't require any kind of 'installation'
- gregjor 2y agoI used the word "install" but the usual rule says I can't install, upload, or execute any non-approved software. Usually that just gets stated as a policy, but I have seen Linux home directories on noexec partitions -- government agencies and big corporations can get very strict about that. So copying a self-contained binary up and running it would violate the policy. I pretty much live in ssh. Remote Desktop means a lot of clicking and watching a GUI visibly repaint. Not efficient. Every so often I have customers using applications that only run on Windows, no API, no command line, so they will enable RDP to that, usually through a VPN.
- kragen 2y agoi see! but i guess your .profile and .vimrc don't count?
- gregjor 2y agoThey aren't executables.
- kragen 2y agomy cousin wrote a vt52 emulator in bash, and i was looking at a macro assembler written in bash the other day: https://github.com/jhswartz/mle-amd64/blob/master/amd64 https://github.com/jhswartz/mle-amd64/blob/master/amd64. i haven't seen a cscope written in bash, but you probably remember how the first versions of ctags were written in sh (or csh?) and ed. so there's not much limit to how far shell functions can go in augmenting your programming environment if awk, python, or perl is accepted, the possibilities expand further
- kelnos 2y agoSure, but this is taking things to a bit of an absurd extreme. If I worked in a restrictive environment where I couldn't install my own tools, I don't think I would be in a position to burn a ton of my employer's time building sophisticated development tools in bash. (One-off small scripts for things, sure. But I'm not going to implement something like ctags or cscope or a LSP server in bash.)
- kragen 2y agocertainly it's absurd! nobody would deny that. on the other hand, the problem to solve is also an absurd problem and i wasn't suggesting trying to bill for doing it, but rather, if you were frequently in this situation, it might be reasonable to spend non-billable time between clients doing it
- 2y ago