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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 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.




Hello, 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.


> 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.


If you're mostly looking for headless VM, you should check out Vagrant. It makes setup, teardown, and provisioning pretty straightforward.


Why 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.


> 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.


Yeah, I kinda guessed that you were talking about something completely different.

The kind of server you are talking about obviously can not be hosted on a local virtual machine. imho that kind of stuff should be hosted in some data center on a stable server. As it contains many of your most valuable assets and losing access (even temporarily) to it could hinder your ability to work, it should have relatively high availability and general reliability.

The kind of server I, and what I believe the article, were talking about is on the other hand convenient to host locally. It's a machine where you can freely test your code or try out some new stuff. This way you don't need to risk your "main" server unnecessarily with your testing.

As VMs are practically free, you can have them everywhere and as many as you wish. On your workstation, desktop at home, or on your laptop on the road, each can have it's own testing VM. And every project you are working on can have it's own testing VM too, so there is no risk of them interfering each other in any way.


If you run a VM, then your dev system is portable. You can put it in dropbox, or on a flash drive.


If 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.


You can put a copy of it there and it only has to happen once. Dropbox has resumable uploading.


Not 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.


> 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.


> Great. Shut down the instance. You pay nothing when it's off.

Not true for Rackspace.


> Not true for Rackspace.

You're right. From what I hear, it may become a feature once they convert everything to openstack.




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