An experiment

March 14th, 2010 | by Sean |

I’m trying a technical experiment at home to maximize my computing “infrastructure.” I have a great setup here: a mac mini (1.83GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB), a MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB), a FreeBSD server (1.4GHz Pentium 4, 1.2GB), and a Gigabit Network.

One of the major challenges I have is what to do with the mac mini and MacBook Pro. I do a terrible job synchronizing the documents and work-in-process across machines despite trying a few different automated solutions. Almost invariably, the things I work on (read: code) are stored on a machine that I ssh into.

So, I’m trying out something new: I’m going to stop using the mac mini for anything workstation-related. I have an ongoing need for Windows and for a development FreeBSD server (one that I can experiment with and break a lot, not something I’d like to do with my regular FreeBSD server at home). So, the mini now runs headless with a few virtual machines on it and all my work is conveniently centralized on my laptop.

I’m curious to see how this will work out. Hopefully well. This post (besides being, I hope, at least marginally interesting) serves as sort of a mile-marker for this trial.

  1. 3 Responses to “An experiment”

  2. By cthrax on Mar 14, 2010 | Reply

    A NEED for Windows? Sounds like someone has drunk the punch… Don’t let woof hear that.

  3. By Sean on Mar 14, 2010 | Reply

    I actually do need it… the Garmin 430 (avionics set) simulator only runs on Windows. :(

  4. By Scott Rippee on Mar 15, 2010 | Reply

    Why not use a SCM system to keep your code sync’ed and ready to use on any system? Something like Dropbox to keep all of your documents and other files available everywhere? I use dropbox to hold git and bazaar repos that are automatically synced to all of my boxes. Then on the local box I pull and push the changes to the dropbox repo folder. Takes the admin pains out of setting up and maintaing a version control system.

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