Total Remote Working

01 Dec 2013

I’m now doing almost all of my computing remotely (and “device independently”), so I thought I’d share what I’ve done and a few roadblocks I had to avoid along the way.

Accessing my Mac remotely

My first attempt to access my Mac Mini from outside my home was via VNC and the built-in screen sharing (plus No-IP and opening up a few ports on my router). This worked just about OK, but all of the VNC clients I found were all a bit useless.

Now I’ve switched to using LogMeIn, which has proved pretty good so far. There is a nice native client on my iPad, plus a Chrome extension for access on any PC.

Windows VM on Azure

One of the excuses I used to buy my new iPad Mini was to save me taking both a Kindle and my personal PC laptop on the road.

However I still need PC access for a few ASP.Net sites I do the odd bit of work on now and again, so I’ve setup a Windows VM on Azure using the credits I get from my MSDN subscription.

It’s running Windows Server 2008 so setting it up with everything I needed was a little fiddly …

Setting up Google Drive on an Azure VM

I keep a backup of my business documents and a few Excel spreadsheets on Google Drive, so need access to them via a PC. However I just couldn’t get the Google Drive Windows client working on the Win2K8 VM.

The solution was found in this discussion group, where it turns out you need to install the x86 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package - even though the servers are amd64 machines for the Google Drive client to work

Access on 64 bit machine via IIS

One of my really old sites still uses an Access database to hold the data (yes I know!), but it turns out there are no native 64 bit drivers for Access.

As explained on this page, the solution is to set the Application Pool to enable 32-bit applications, and all is right in this old fashioned world!

Doing everything in the cloud?

I’m pretty happy with almost always using my small but high-resolution iPad Mini to do the odd bit of development when away from home. The iOS Remote Desktop client is truly excellent (as is the MacOS one), and the times when I’m opening up my Windows laptop are less and less.

I’m thinking off possibly getting a small bluetooth keyboard - as extended typing on the the screen is pretty painful - but other than that it’s working surprisingly well.