3 Work Machines

The latest in my seemingly sadistic and twisted computing tricks includes adding another machine to handle my workload. I already use my laptop to connect to Sufyan’s desktop at work (through VNC) to delay the death of my lappy’s hard disk (bad sectors have started to appear), but it slows down response times for both of us.

My Opera browser alone eats up over 100MB of RAM due to my nasty habit of keeping dozens of pages open at once. Add to that, Sufyan’s instance of Opera and all the other apps that we both run, the 370MB of system RAM runneth over pretty quickly.

Instead of going through the pain of moving data to another system and reinstalling/updating the software I need, I’ve mounted my existing home directory on another machine (through NFS). Now I can connect to this new machine through VNC, take advantage of the newer interface (Fedora) and take the load off of Sufyan’s machine. Since all my configuration files are the same as before, I don’t even need to reconfigure anything. Try accomplishing all this on that certain other OS.

There was one problem though. The new machine has even less RAM than the old one so Opera still wasn’t playing fair. In the end, I’m running everything, except the browser, on the new machine, using its RAM and CPU, while Opera continues to run on the old one, projecting its display on the VNC server through SSH.

Simple, ain’t it?

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