Before posting this, I've done some research and tried different solutions. The question is how to configure a system so that it would be possible to SSH into it's vagrant box from external/different network?
I have a Windows machine at home. I have installed Vagrant and now able to access the contents both via HTTP and SSH from any device connected to very same network.
What I want to do is to be able to get a laptop, go to a nice little café just across the river, sit down and work on my project which sits in that Vagrant box on my home desktop PC.
I am quite terrible in networking and not sure what is the solution. Do I need to make my home desktop a server? If so, which steps should I take? Do I need to do configure something in my router software? Or do I need to create some kind of VPN stuff where Vagrant thinks I am actually requesting it's contents from the same home network or perhaps I just better give up and setup a droplet in the DigitalOcean instead?
To moderators: please don't shut this question because the answer is an opinion based. I am happy to listen to these opinions and I want to know which steps to follow to achieve what I want.
Thanks
Why not just copy your Vagrantfile to the laptop and spin up an instance there? It would be much less work, faster, and importantly much safer than opening up your desktop computer to the world.
I think your own suggestion of a remote server is also a valid option, although not quite as simple as just using the laptop.
First, I guess I'd have to figure out if I'm running remotely and second I'd have to figure out whether my remote connection is a standalone remote app or an app running on a terminal server (that may be tricky).
But, once I've figured out all those awful things, is there a way to run a windows function like ShellExecute locally instead of remotely?
The reason I'd want to do this is because I launch a web browser to view rather high bandwidth things that require javascript and flash and certain sysadmins who administer our product aren't too keen on having to make unnecessary and insecure modifications to their terminal server farm.
Yes, if the clients are running Windows and you can install software on them.
See Remote Desktop Services Virtual Channels in MSDN.
There is a free tool that does exactly what you want. I got reference from TechNet forums, it's named Remote Executer from http://www.mqtechnologies.com
Good luck
I know that I can code on one machine and have it build on a different machine (ie. a build server). Now I have also heard that you can have visual studio run a build on a virtual machine (i think it requires Virtual PC). Now my question is if anyone has been able to code on machine A, have it compile on machine B and run a debugging sesion on machine C?
This is pretty common in enterprise development and just about the de facto standard way of doing things.
Typically, a dev works locally. Once s/he is happy with their changes, they'll check it into a source control system.
From that point there are a couple of options ranging from automated building to having someone push the button to cause the remote build.
Once the build is complete there are a host of options available for deploying the app to one or more other servers. And yet other options for kicking off automated test suites.
Concerning remote debugging, you can do that independently of whether you are using a build/deployment/automated testing. It's just a matter of getting the right stuff installed and configured (see ho1's answer for a link).
All of that said, I highly recommend you never enable remote debugging on a production server. Some people might disagree with me but I personally think it's dangerous for security reasons and can certainly lead to site outages.
Finally, the only reasons you would need a virtual machine is if the servers aren't available or if you just want to sandbox everything.
You can do remote debugging, so if you had an automated process to copy the compiled code from B to C, I suppose you could do what you're asking.
See this MSDN article for more details: How to: Set Up Remote Debugging
I'm a web developer that needs to build a piece of software for my local office of about 20-30 Windows computers. It needs to automatically and silently run software updates and deployments on all computers.
The Windows computers run on a local network. I'm not sure where to start putting my hands on with something like this... I'm an experienced programmer, just need the right direction on what to read.
I know each Windows client has a Samba server, and also we're using Active Directory, but I'm not sure how that works.
How would I go about starting developing this? I'm sure there's Windows APIs for samba file transfers, but I also need to know about documentation on silently installing the .exe or whatever, and also I need APIs to know the applications running on the client to understand if they need to be updated.
Where's all these APIs?
Have a look at wpkg.org. It's license is GPL. It runs on Samba in an Active Directory. See also their feature overview.
I mentioned Samba only because you also did so. Though your exact words read: 'I know each Windows client has a Samba server [....] though I'm not sure how that works.'
In case you meant that each Windows client has access to a Samba server, my answer may be contributing to help you.
In case you thought your Windows clients are running Samba themselves, this is impossible (but my answer may help to clarify a few things nevertheless).
Here's why:
Samba is an implementation of the Microsoft SMB stack of networking protocols for Unix-oid operating systems.
SMB is what all Windows computers use natively.
why exactly you want do develop this application
there is a Microsoft product responsible for this thing . it is called SUS server
We have tremendous problems with Visual Studio (2008, if that matters) locking up and slowing down when accessing projects over a network drive. It can take several minutes to open a large Web site project through a mapped drive, and saving even a single file can take a minute or more.
I fired up Wireshark and watched the traffic. VS, it seems, requests massive amounts of files from the network -- there's an enormous amount of SMB traffic. I've done some research, and this traffic seems to stem from two situations.
VS has to have everything in its own process to provide Intellisense.
VS needs to have all the source in order to compile the project.
All the advice I've read seems to boil down to the same thing: work locally, not on a remote machine, then push your code to an integration server via source control.
This would sure solve our problems (VS is quite fast working locally), but what if you can't work locally? What if the project and the infrastructure required to run it is too large and complicated to be replicated on everyone's individual machines?
We've gone 'round this problem a couple times, and the only way we can figure to work on these projects is direct access via a mapped drive. However, the VS slowness and lockups are really becoming a problem.
One solution: we installed VS on the server and work on the projects directly on the servers via RDP. Seriously.
So, I ask:
What does everyone else do? Do you work via the network, or do you replicate projects locally? If remotely, do you suffer from VS performance issues.
We work locally and use SVN to keep all our code on the server.
I find VS 2008 quite slow working locally sometimes so I wouldn't fancy working on a network share.
Trying to compile over a network share is horribly slow using visual studio. Your start times will be bad as the intellisense database is regenerated. Each compilation has to go over the network multiple times. Linking takes forever.
If you need the output of your compilation on the network, I'd recommend doing your compile locally and defining a post-build command to copy the results to your share.
If, as you say, you cannot pull everything locally then I'd suggest your project is too big and needs to be broken up into more manageable chunks. For a multi-tier application, break it up by tier and invest in some form of continuous integration (e.g. CruiseControl) to automatically build individual pieces. In this way you can work locally on an particular piece and pull the pre-build portions from CI for the other pieces of the application.
I'm not terribly surprised that using VS to load projects over a network share has performance issues. VS (in any language) is constantly getting information from files in the project. Once you start loading this over a network you're at the mercy of the underlying network connection. All lags and access issues will directly translate into VS having an issue loading file contents.
I would advise copying the solution locally and using some form of source code control to sync the project on the share.
If the code is too complicated to install on everyone's machine, then don't put it on everyone's machine. Does everyone need to have everything in order to do productive work?
I have 79 projects in my solution that I work with. Several hundred thousand lines of code. I pull my source down everyday from TFS and build it; it's a lot of code, but it's a far better solution than trying to work over a network share.
A more legitimate situation of having the source code on a share is when one has a non-Windows host on which a (number of) virtual Windows machine is running.
I have this exact situation where my desktop machine (the host) is running Debian and I use VMware to run various virtual Windows machines (the guests), including one that has Visual Studio installed so that I can target Windows OS's. Having the source code on a Samba share on the host machine has the following pro's:
The source is not duplicated, so there is no way to confuse different copies while working on several virtual machines at the same time.
I have full control over the source from my preferred OS.
I can turn on and off any of the virtual machines, or roll back to a snapshot, without the risk of loosing changes.
I can build (etc.) from the same source on several machines without having to commit changes before the source fully tested (reason: I have to use Subversion <1.5).
The only problem with this setup is that Visual Studio (6,7,8,9) is painfully slow.
I have mounted the partition (on which the share lies) with "relatime" and this works in as far as the disk activity on the share moderate, but Visual Studio keeps the (virtual) network card occupied all the time.
Any solutions to this would be very appreciated.
I encountered similar problems everytime I worked (work = anything else then just copy / paste files) over a network drive. The problem occured with ZendStudio and Eclipse.
Why not use any kind of source control?
When working on Windows based projects I've always worked locally.
Once at a unix shop (AIX iirc) developers would work via NFS mount and checkin/checkout via RCS...
I'm using VS2005 across to a network share and not having any performance issues. However, it is a new server (Windows Server 2008). I don't have any other data points for VS since using it at work is relatively new for me.
However, some datapoints from using Netbeans for previous projects on a network share... Local build time for my project was 2 minutes on Vista, on a fast dual-core AMD 64-bit machine. For a network share project, on a Server 2003 box, it was 20 minutes. Building that same project from an ancient Tablet PC (1ghz, single core) running XP locally was around 5 minutes. Interestingly enough, the Tablet PC could build on the Server 2003 box in the same 5 minutes.
For those asking "why" on the network share. The network share is automatically backed up, archived, etc. Also, that way I can very easily look at the same projects from multiple machines without having to worry about pushing back into the repository, etc. Once you've gone to having your dev stuff on a device where you can get to it from anywhere/anything, you'll never want to do local storage again!
I have performance problems via network anything, they just aren't good enough yet.
I thought it was common knowledge that disk-speed is one of the major "slowness" factors when it comes to using VS in Windows. Most dev machines I've built have had projects located on 10k RPM RAID0 drives, or at least a single 10k RPM drive. And even then it seems slow sometimes. Just the way it is, I suppose, until VS2009/VS2010 fixes it? :)
From my experience, this lag when working on a network share is 99% due to Intellisense. Disable it and you'll see.
disabling Intellisense indeed speeds up saving and opening files trough a UNC share dramatically
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2007/12/03/did-you-know-how-to-turn-off-intellisense-by-default.aspx
but then again, as stated in other comments, you might as well use a good text editor
I've also experienced the problems with performance mentioned above. It seems to vary from project to project, but I did find one way of speeding up performance significantly for some project types.
Following the advice in this article made a previously unusable project on a network location (it would take minutes to open one file) perform almost like a local project. The basic gist is that you need to grant FULL TRUST to the network location:
To grant permission to all your projects in your Visual Studio Projects folder located on the network, follow these 8 steps:
Open Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 (or 2.0) Configuration which you'll
find under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel.
Expand Runtime Security Policy | Machine, | Code Groups | All_Code |
LocalIntranet_Zone In the right-hand pane, click Add a Child Code
Group.
In the dialog that follows choose Create a new code group and fill in
a Name like Visual Studio Projects.
Optionally, provide a Description for the Code Group. (You'll see the
description when you click a Code Group in the left tree, helping you
identify the various Code Groups you may have) .
In the Condition Type drop down, choose URL
For the URL field, type something like this:
file://YourServer/My Documents/Visual Studio Projects/*
Under Use existing permission set, choose FullTrust (that is, if you
trust your own applications. If you don't, choose a different
permission set or create a new one).
Not sure why this works, but it made a previously unusable NET 2.0 project perform significantly better.
Original article: http://imar.spaanjaars.com/364/how-do-i-allow-my-visual-studio-net-projects-to-run-from-a-network-location
I was having the same problem. I have a local copy of our build system, which expects certain drive letters, and was also experiencing slowness.
I have solved the problem by adding the following registry keys:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices]
"R:"="\DosDevices\D:\devel\build
"S:"="\DosDevices\D:\devel\src"
Note that the double '\'s above are part of the .reg file format. When using regedit use single '\' throughout.
My build times were divided by 3. :)
I found the info in the wikipedia article on the SUBST command.