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Comment by criley | Hacker News Reader

So I have to buy another machine to develop and test my stuff on? What's the point of a powerful laptop if it's just a dumb terminal to connect to my actual development machine?

Why not just buy a $300 super cheap laptop and do the exact same thing? Sure I'll have less resolution on the machine, but seeing as the developing is happening on another machine all together, it seems like the performance would be similar.

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Well, if you're a developer, presumably this isn't the first computer you have owned. I'm using a 5 year old cheapy HP laptop as my dev server and it works wonderfully.

There are other alternatives, of course, Cloud9 premium account gives you full shell access, Action.IO gives you full shell access as well.

Regarding the idea of using an old laptop as a dev server, have you run into any issues as a result of having the laptop on all the time (such as overheating)?

Also, how would you set it up so that you can log in to your laptop from outside your LAN? I have a few old machines lying around and it would be great if I could put them to use as servers.

Shouldn't have overheating issues as long as you sit it so that the vents can breath. I leave mine in the basement where it's a little bit cooler. My current uptime is 45 days, I only restart for kernel upgrades and never shut it down.

I purchased dynamic DNS, which IIRC is around $35/year, well worth it for the convenience of logging into my home server whereever I am.

DrDreams you are hellbanned. I don't find your comments especially terrible so perhaps you were just unlucky or something, so I'm telling you.

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