Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

While my home setup is unlikely to change any time soon, I recently started pondering switching my main workstation at work from Windows 7 to XUbuntu, and making my secondary machine my Windows 7 system. But if Windows 7 is no longer the Synergy server, but a Synergy client, how do you keep the connection secure through SSH? Easy! Keep the Windows box as the SSH server, just change the tunnel direction. Read on for additional details.

Subject to changes: Windows 7 is where I find myself spending most of my time: At home it’s my game machine, and at work … well, it makes a passable platform for my email and web browsers. So, that’s where my keyboard and mouse live. However, at both home and work I have an Ubuntu (Linux variant) system next to the Windows box, and occasionally I add my laptop (also running Ubuntu) to the mix. I use Synergy to control the Linux systems from the Windows system, and use SSH tunnels to secure the connection. Here’s how I do it.

I’ve had Windows 7 64 bit on my home machine for about a week now. While I don’t use my home workstation as much as say, my work laptop while sitting in front of the TV, the home workstation is where I’m more likely to see issues with hardware compatibility and software issues. Here’s what I ran into and the resolutions (if any) that I’ve settled on.

It’s Geek Story Time! In preparation for upgrading my personal machine to Windows 7, decided to move my existing Windows XP partition to another hard drive, and validate its operation by doing “dual boot” with two different XP installations. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds …

I finally got around to getting a hold of and installing Windows 7. I haven’t used it much, but I’ve used it enough to give some initial impressions of it …