Portable Server for On-the-Road Development?

DurnikBob asks: "I do a tremendous amount of development work sitting in hotel rooms while I'm on the road. While I've used Xen and VMware on my laptop, they come with limitations (memory usage, not 'real-life', interfere with my day job, and so on) that I'd like to move away from. I've looked at short depth 1U servers (the 19" wide makes it almost impossible to carry in the laptop bag), carrying a separate laptop (hate the weight penalty and cost of the not used keyboard and screen), the Mini-ITX field (each one I've looked at has the 1 DIMM, 1GB max limitation) and even the Mac-Mini (2" tall is a killer). Does anyone know if someone makes something along the lines of the following: small footprint (laptop size case 1" tall); Intel/AMD dual core capable; 2GB memory; space for 2.5" drives; on-board video (no need to fake it for headless operation); and on-board wireless?"

Comments

Remotely?

[foundme]

If you're working in a hotel room, I assumed it will be paid for by the company and most likely comes with internet connection.

So is it not possible to use VNC/RDP to access your servers? Apparently it won't work if you need physical access to the server.

I too, am having a similar problem. I'll be working in up to 4 locations soon, and I'm leaning towards setting up a server in one location, and remotely log on and do all my works via the internet. This is aided by the fact that all locations have reasonable broadband connection.

This way I can just bring a lightweight PIII laptop with me, and use whatever keyboard, mouse and monitor that are available in each location.

Obviously this arrangement will be rendered useless in case of a WAN outage, but if I ever lost/dropped/forgot-to-bring my laptop, my data will be intact and I still have other means to access them.

Re:Remotely?

[commanderfoxtrot]

I stay in a lot of business-class hotels (4* and above).

I very rarely encounter flaky/unreliable internet connections in the hotels.

More commonly, there just isn't a connection in the room, so one has to use dialup or the business lounge. There are very few business hotels now in Western countries without internet of some kind now.

In these circumstances, I generally use the internet over my mobile telephone.

I very rarely use VNC/X remotely; most of my work is done at the command line on the remote servers, or in X locally on my laptop.

Everything is available offline through Subversion and database copies so I can work even while disconnected.

what's your server doing?

[LeninZhiv]

You need to know *exactly* what your server needs to serve.

A Mac Mini sure seems like the coolest possible "suitcase server" imaginable, but if you want or might want commercial "enterprise" products like DB2, Oracle, Sybase, WebLogic or WebSphere, your list of options gets quickly shortened for you. Neither OS X or Linux PPC are going to do the job, because you rely on closed-source software whose 'Linux support' is implicitly x86 only (plus *maybe* x86-64). Wait for the Intel-based mini I suppose, and make sure first that the packages you need will run on it.

But as I imagine others will point out, a 1U server for development work would be huge overkill; a remote server or simply running everything on your development machine (through VMWare if necessary) makes way, WAY more sense here, for a myriad of reasons. On the other hand, if your "server" world is 100% open source, you may well be able to craft the ultimate travel server exactly to your specifications with a geek-cool factor that is off the scale. But you don't *need* to; I've written AS/400 WebSphere apps with only Tomcat on Windows (sadly)... but hey, if that's the kind of work you're doing, good luck fitting an AS/400 into your briefcase...

Re:what's your server doing?

[danpat]

Wait for the Intel-based mini I suppose...

What, like this one? http://www.apple.com/macmini/intelcore.html

it already exists

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

you are describing the macbook pro. dual core 2GHz Intel Core Duo; 2G ram; 120G hd. quit your bitchin, and get a good machine.

also, they have made this great utility that allows you to connect to another (possibly more powerful) machine. its called 'ssh'.

Look at the T60p

[(H)elix1]

Take a look at the Thinkpad t60p series. Dual core, 4G of RAM, SATA drives... The bloody machine was a substantial jump forward from just about any workstation (or gaming rig) I've ever had. Doing development on my main box while running the application server stack on a VMWare image. Make sure you run Linux or Win64, or you might as well config it with 3G of RAM however.

Cappuccino...

[p7]

This is about the best I could find.

http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp350.asp

With options it should cover most of your requirements. CPU might be a bit weak.

Eh?

[adelayde]

What are you on about?? Get a laptop and use that. If you need to run VMWare (why??), then get some more RAM in order to be able to run it. I do development on a low-end Dell Inspiron 510M with 1/2 GB RAM and develop in a Apache+mod_perl+Mysql+Emacs+Firefox environment and it runs fine, running Xorg, KDE, Thunderbird to boot. Any model laptop better than the one I have should do you proud. If weight's a problem, then Dells aren't maybe for you, get an iBook or a PowerBook or a Sony Vaio or something like that. Mac MINI's are pretty cool, but you'd need to buy a very small flat screen and mini keyboard and mouse. In short, I can't really see much point in your posting I'm afraid, the short answer is get a/another laptop my friend.

Cappuccinopc

[rtechie]

You're unlikely to find anything much smaller than thishttp://www.cappuccinopc.com/mochae7042b.asp. It doesn't support the new dual-core chips though. Cooling would likely be a problem.

You really need that much power?

[msuzio]

It's funny, as I'm reading this I'm packing my two Kurobox-en (http://www.kurobox.com/) into my suitcase to take with me on the road for some development. Two systems, each about the size of a Mac Mini, one has my web server and Subversion, one has the MySQL database.

Works fine for me. Granted, I'm not doing J2EE development on the boxes (these are my Rails development boxes), but honestly, they both seem to pack a ton of horsepower for the teeny CPU and power requirements (17 Watts each). Total cost for both units plus a 300 GB disk for each -- about $550.

I use these boxes because I happen to have them (when they're not development boxes, they are my home disk servers -- bringing them along has the side benefit of me having access to my MP3 collection on the road too). If I were buying something just for this purpose, I'd get a Mac Mini (~$1000 tricked out) or a second laptop (a Dell laptop with decent horsepower but low on the bells and whistels would be under $1000, I just speced one out today).

Most of the time, I do development *entirely* on my laptop. With 1GB RAM and a mid-range Pentium M, it keeps up just fine with an IDE up, a web server, and a J2EE servlet container (it's when I add a database on top of all that that it starts to slow down too much). Two laptops would handle my needs just fine. Most demos I see when vendors come in these days are run off the Sales Engineers laptop, so I'd say it's becoming a ubiquitous solution.

I guess since I'm one of many asking the "why" questions, maybe we need a better statement of the reasons you think you need so much horsepower. Certainly, for $2000 or so (still less than a 1U server, I'm sure) you could have *two* small boxes which would fit in any decent sized laptop bag (my laptop bag fits both my Kuros side by side, and they are comparable in size to a Mac Mini).