Ask HN: How do you prevent downtime from dev machine problems?

2 points by azernik 9y ago ↗ HN

So here I sit, with my computer in the shop for some (not-entirely-essential) repairs, and hoping I'll get my computer back in time to get a good workday in tomorrow. Which gets me to thinking about how to deal with situations like this in the future.

I could keep a second computer lying around, with separate SSH keys for login to all the relevant servers, but that feels a but risky in terms of security. Maybe better, I could keep one around with an identical hardware setup to my primary machine, so I can just swap out the hard drive when a non-storage device on one fails.

What are some other strategies? What's your preferred trade-off between convenience and security?

2 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 12.3 ms ] thread

stephenr 9y ago ↗

I keep things like ssh keys password protected and stored on a (server|usbkey|cloud storage|etc) with some dot files etc.

For project development everything I do runs in VMs, mostly configured via Vagrant. I happen to store these vm's on an express card SSD so could in theory swap them to another machine, but the idea is that in the event of catastrophe it's just a `hg clone` and `vagrant up` to get back up and running.

I_am_neo 9y ago ↗

Clonezilla and linux - just find a compatible machine and restore your working desktop's bits and bytes. Not entirely necessary with linux to have "exact" hardware to clone between but it helps. Not sure how well it would work with other OSes I only use linux.