Ask HN: Remote Linux Environment | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Remote Linux Environment

9 pointssiscia6 comments

Hi HN,

I am yet again asking for your experience.

I am in need of a linux remote development environment. Basically I just need a linux box on somebody else server with some disk space, enough CPU and RAM to run the compiler, and network connection to download stuff and to remotely connect to it.

Is there any service that does this for myself without me having to think about backup, turning off the machine when I am not using, storing volumens, etc...

All trivial stuff that need to be automated...

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There isn't any such complete system, but you can set up a virtual desktop on a VPS that you connect to over x2go or chrome remote desktop. I run a bunch of local and remote desktops this way, inside containers or VMs, based off a common setup script [1]. I mount my homedir to something external (mounted LXD volumes, docker mounts, iscsi, whatever) so that I can blast away the container/VM and rebuild it without destroying my homedir.

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/ubuntu-dev-installer/blob/maste...

What’s the latency of x2go like? I wonder if it might be more performant on a local lab than X over Ssh

Locally, both x2go and chrome remote desktop are very fast. You can even watch videos, although they stutter from time to time and the audio gets choppy.

I have had this need at work so I can learn Kubernetes and I used Microsoft Azure.

You can create a VM in a few seconds loaded with Ubuntu. I went for the approx $100/month machine because I shut it down when not in use so it costs nowhere near that. You have to shut it down in the portal or via azure api, not using the shell command to save money.

It’s easy to SSH into and possible to Remote Desktop although I haven’t made that work yet.

The turning off the machine when not using it requirement would require you to write code to detect that you are not using it. You could write something that once there is no ssh for 15 minutes calls the azure api to shut it down.

I had good experience with ramnode [1]. Around 10$/month you can get a vps which has enough power to do work on.

[1] https://www.ramnode.com/vps.php

I am using a 5$/month linode server. 1 vcpu, half a gig of ram, 20 gig space. Good enough for some node-js dev. Not enough for haskell unfortunately.

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