Synergy, a real space saver

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Are you lacking of desk space because of all the keyboards and mice you have on it?

Well, I had the same problem until recently. I have a Linux workstation, a laptop running Windows XP Home and from time to time my work laptop running Windows XP Professional. My desk was getting pretty overcrowded, to say the least.

That was until I came across an application called Synergy. Synergy is kind of like VNC, except that it only communicates mouse and keyboard events and not the whole graphical screen like VNC does - which means it’s pretty fast (as it transfers much less data then VNC). It is also cross-platform, where X11 (Linux, BSD, Solaris etc.), Windows and OSX are supported. My old iMac is located in a different room so I haven’t tried it on the OSX platform yet. As I have got a bit more deskspace now I am concidering moving the iMac to my lab.

The only drawback with it is that it doesn’t use any encryption or authentication, so some sort of VPN between the machines needs to be created first, unless you don’t care about that sort of thing (which, in my humble opinion, you should).

The SecurityNOW! podcast just finished going through a lot of different VPN solutions, while personally I find PPTP works for me in my LAN. You want to check out episode 14, 15, 17, 18 and 19.