By Metallo on

Hi all,

a few days ago I installed Drupal 6.14 on my PC using WAMP, I created a test project and I am learning the wonders Drupal can do.
Now, I have a small home network:

- my PC desktop (wired), where Drupal is installed
- my laptop (wireless).

Sometimes, I'd like to have the possibility to access my project from my laptop and continue the work done on my PC.

I am sure there is a way to share, perhaps the whole WAMP? But I think there are better alternatives specific for this cases?

Your advice is very welcomed.

Cheers
Alex

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

steve02476’s picture

steve02476 commented

I think this is not really a Drupal issue, because your question would be exactly the same if you were working with Joomla, for example, or anything else running on your WAMP system. But I can easily understand why you would want to do this. I think there are many directions you could take with this, depending on what you are trying to do.

For instance, you could use VNC or similar so that you can use your laptop screen and keyboard to control the PC as if you were actually sitting at the PC.

Of you could log in to the PC, so you could directly access the files from your laptop. There are many ways to do this.

But again, this doesn't have much to do with Drupal, this is a matter of accessing one computer from another computer, which can be useful and can be complicated. Good luck.

Metallo’s picture

Metallo commented

I understand it is not a Drupal specific issue, but it is probably a common question many Drupallers may have.
I think it is useful for the community to post experiences regarding this, there must be simple and pragmatic solution.

I think sharing the wamp folder will do the trick, as well as using a VPN connection, basically you take control of your source computer, but I guess the main problem is the slowness going through the admin functions, I mean, this is already a known issue using wamp. can you imagine on a local network?

Perhaps, have any of you experimented alternatives?

Thank you
Alex

dman’s picture

dman commented

There's a million factors, but what you are going to get used to is accessing a website as a website.
So (assuming we are not going to go for full stand-alone replication - which is a big pain just for single-user development) you want to treat the machine that's being the webserver ... as a webserver.
Depending on your LAN choices, you can just type in the IP of your PC from your laptop. And boom, you are looking at that PCs WAMP.
For development, you map a drive as usual, and edit remotely.
You will see no speed problems at all on a LAN, possibly even a speed up as the server will be dedicated to its job, and not sharing any space with your laptop desktop and browser tasks.

To do it properly, you should adjust your LAN or network identification so that your server machine has a NAME, or a STATIC IP, or both. That's up to you and your router, but it means you can be sure to find it in the same place after a restart.

If you are talking about accessing the site from your laptop when you are OUTSIDE of your home LAN, that's almost the same story. Look at your router for how to do port forwarding so you can see port 80 of your home machine from the outside world. Opening up FILE EDITING from the outside world is not something I'll go into, as it's a huge security problem unless you've done the research the hard way yourself. FTP, SFTP, SSH, NFS, and more (SAMBA of course) drivers are available for that, but all require you to weaken your firewall.

Better solutions (there are many) require you to look into the choices yourself and see what really fits your workflow.

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

Metallo’s picture

Metallo commented

Dan,

Thank you very much for your reply, that's exactly what I was looking for :)

I will try the different options and choose the most suitable for me.

Regards
Alex

Metallo’s picture

Metallo commented

Dan,

by simply typing in the IP of my PC from my laptop works fine, the only problem I am facing is the Google Maps API key, I get a pop us saying that the key is not recognized.

Has this to do with your statement below?

[Quote]
To do it properly, you should adjust your LAN or network identification so that your server machine has a NAME, or a STATIC IP, or both. That's up to you and your router, but it means you can be sure to find it in the same place after a restart.[/quote]

Is this because the key is registered to http://www.localhost/ and when I call it using the IP from my laptop it is not recognized because the address is my local IP?

Thanks for your help

Cheers
Alex

dman’s picture

dman commented

To mess around with remote APIs like that, you may need to do more.
Yes, I'd probably advise taking steps towards getting your server addressed by name rather than by IP, but how you do that is up to you and your router. The version of your DVD writer, printer and monitor you list are not relevant to this question.

IIRC, Google Maps API requires the sites it's used on to be publically accessible. That does not apply to your local dev site or intranet.
OTOH, I think that you CAN get an API key for localhost, so you may have to use that. Really, it's up to you to find out ways of managing your LAN in a way that makes sense to you. I found out by reading the documentation and examples for "bind" DNS, and I now run an internal DNS server for my dev network.
If you don't want to do that yet, then carry on just hacking the HOSTS file on your machines.

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

Metallo’s picture

Metallo commented

Yes, definitely you can get a key to be used as localhost, I will investigate and find a way to use it remotely.

Thanks
Alex