Controlling old manufacturing PC with new PC - remote-access

I'm going to ask the question very generically, please bare with me.
The current setup I'm working with is Old (Linux) Computer in office controlling $millions worth of equipment in Fab. Due to firewalls/Computer being very old, we can't remote desktop to the machine - replacements and modification to current system are not an option. Many problems that come up can be solved in 10 minutes, but require a 30 min commute to the office.
Is there a way to control the input to the current system with a Modern PC? Hardwire the modern PC into the Linux system, and remote to the PC. Ideally we could remote login to the PC, and see and control the Linux system while the Linux system/Fab doesn't know anything has changed.

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RDWeb problems on Windows 10 (patch 1803) - Windows in background

We're a software developer currently oferring a Cloud version of our software, hosted in a remote virtual machine. Our customers access this virtual machine via RDWeb, seeing (and working with) only the program.
Since the mentioned update (1083), our customers' computers running on Windows 10 are reporting a problem in which whenever they open a new windows in our software, that window is automatically moved to the background, behind other windows they may have opened in our software. That causes them to believe the program has crashed, and is seriously interfering with their line of work. The only common ground we've been able to find is the operating system (Windows 10) and that they had recently installed an update (specifically, the 1083 patch).
Has anyone had similar issues? If so, how have you managed to solve them?
Thanks in advance for your help and your patience
Jaime Peña
Kherian Soft, S.L.

What is the best practice to code when the project is on a Guest OS (Virtualbox)?

I have a project and the files are on Guest OS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with Virtualbox, my host OS is Mac OS. I used to coding right in RHEL with editor Atom. But my boss told me that it's inefficient to code in a Guest OS, well, it makes sense because Mac OS or Windows is more responsive than linux, so I changed my way:
Copy the whole project located on RHEL to a share folder between Mac OS and RHEL using rsync
Code with Atom in Mac OS
Copy back the project in share folder to the original project in RHEL by rsync
I'm using Atom (not vim in RHEL) because it can edit the whole project in one window which is convenient for my situation. But there is a problem: after copying back the project in Step 3, git status shows everything has been changed even though I just edited only a few files. That is a little annoying.
Is there any better way to code in such environment? any advice is appreciated.
BretzL's suggestion to use shared folders is a good one, but I think it's important to address the underlying issue: your boss' assumption about coding being inefficient or slow just because you're working on a VM is simply not true.
It sounds like your new workflow, which was instituted as a result of his/her advice, is causing you to have a harder time developing that you did on the VM. The shared folders will help with that, but if you have the VM configured to have access to enough cores and memory, then its performance for most tasks will be fine, and there may not be any problem with developing on the VM directly. I do a significant amount of development on a VM, and haven't had any issues. You may experience slower builds on the VM if you're building whole kernels or other large projects, but if that's not the case, it should be fine.
If you didn't have any performance or productivity problems before forcing yourself to work outside of the VM, then... it wasn't a problem.
(I also have an issue with the assumption that Linux is always less responsive than Windows or Mac OS, but that's a debate for a different day.)
VirtualBox supports shared folders, so you dont need to rsync back and forth. Just mount the shared folder into where your application server on RHEL guest expects the code.
I also recommend you take a look at https://www.vagrantup.com/ for managing developer VMs.

windows xp to windows 7 file transfer via USB and via command line

I have a windows XP based computer that is connected (peer 2 peer style) to a Windows 7 based computer. The goal is file transfer between the two.
Here's hitch one, the connection between the two computers is via USB. Ethernet is not an option and completely off the table for this situation, we're stuck with USB (Windows XP computer hardware configuration is inaccessible save for the USB hub). We do have the ability to install software on it though.....same situation goes for the Windows 7 machine
Here's hitch two, The solution MUST be implemented such that file transfers can be accomplished via DOS command terminal from the Windows XP based computer...so no bridge cable and "GUI dragging of files" is allowed. A bridge cable driven by DOS command line..now that would be a solution but have yet to see one.
Here's some buzzwords I have accumulated through some lengthy google research that might help explain where I believe I'm heading.
usbnet
RNDIS
PuTTY
plink
FTP server
I would like to ask how the IT experts would handle this, what software is needed on which end and what kind of configurations could I expect to have to deal with. I am a bit unsure about the whole ethernet over USB thing as it applies to this peer 2 peer situation and would welcome any advice.

How to get the amount of each program used in Linux?

I'm new to Linux.
Now I'm doing a project that I need to find out the time of each program used in a specific period.
Is there any command I can use? Or I need to manually check the system log?
And I found that only recent days of history logs displayed in the log viewer. Is there anyway to get all the logs?
Thanks.
I'm using Fedora.
Back in the day when a computer in every desk was only a dream, computers were too expensive and few companies could afford to buy one - so they just rent some computer time from a provider. My dumb terminal was connected to the host computer over a regular phone line using a modem, at the astonishing speed of 9.6 kbps.
This was the era of Time-Share. From this time, Unix got process accounting.
See the Enabling Process Accounting on Linux HOWTO.

Advantages of Using Linux as primary developer desktop [closed]

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I want to get some input on some of the advantages of why developers should and need to use Linux as their primary development desktop on a daily basic as opposed to using Windows. This is particulary helpful when your Dev, QA, and Production environments are Linux.
The current analogy that I keep coming back to is. If I build my demo car as a Ford Escort, but my project car is a Ford Mustang, it doesn't make sense at all.
I'm currently at an IT department that allows dual boot with Windows and Linux, but some run Linux while the vast majority use Windows.
Here's several advantages that I've came up with since using Linux as a primary desktop.
Same Exact operating system as Dev, QA, and Production
Same Scripts (.sh) instead of maintaining (.bat and *.sh). Somewhat mitigated by using cygwin, but still a bit different.
Team learns simple commands such as: cd, ls, cat, top
Team learns Advanced commands like: pkill, pgrep, chmod, su, sudo, ssh, scp
Full access to installs typically for Linux, such as RPM, DEB installs just like the target environments.
The list could go on and on, but I want to get some feedback of anything that I may have missed, or even any disadvantages (of course there are some). To me it makes sense to migrate an entire team over to using Linux, and using Virtual Box, running Windows XP VM's to test functional items that 95% of most of the world uses.
This is similar but a little different thread going on here as well.
link text
I have to say getting forced into SSH access to a linux development box for PHP/MySQL development has been one of my greatest and fastest growth experiences as a developer (who formerly worked only in windows XP as a dev environment) as well as bridging some of the knowledge gap between development and sysadmin tasks which is great for developers to understand more about, especially if you ever end up in a one-man army kind of situation.
I was all about windows/eclipse and point and click, and now I am all about VIM and keyboard shortcuts. The color coding/auto tab complete stuff is pretty good these days.
Where I work we use Rackspace Cloud servers for production and development. I imaged the production server (2G ram/CentOS 5.2 stack) for a dev server (so the environment IS EXACTLY THE SAME not close but EXACT) and run it on the smallest instance (256M ram) which is only about $12 month for my dev box. My buddy had a mac he did local dev on for the same codebase and he experienced subtle bugs in the code due to the mac environment, that I do not experience on my cloud dev box (or production).
So what I am getting at is with this type of shift (to the cloud for linux dev with no GUI) portability and quick recovery from hardware failure, and productivity (keyboard shortcuts rule over point/click/drag select) are some other major advantages. Obvs you can learn keyboard shortcuts in Windows too, but when forced to work in only a terminal window, you learn a lot more of them out of necessity. I run Windows 7 on a laptop (essentially as a dumb terminal to my cloud devbox), but I SSH into my devbox with putty and work on code with VIM and manage it with git. If my laptop ever fails or gets stolen, all I really need is ANY computer that has an SSH client (and internet connection) and I can be productive on a temporary loaned computer within 30 minutes until my preferred hardware is fixed/replaced. (all my passwords on the laptop are in a keepass encrypted db which is backed up on dropbox.com as well as external HD, occasional gmail to self). And of course configure putty with nice fonts/font size and full-screen window size.
In contrast getting a windows box from clean install to dev environment tweaked exactly how you want might take a couple full-time days plus a couple hours here and there for a month, and still not replicate the production environment to your needs.
Ok, end biased rant - I guess my point is I didn't know what I was missing as a windows guy, and simple non GUI linux tools for web development have proven to be superior to me for how we work. But also note my laptop is Windows 7, so when work is done or a need to do some IE testing, I'm on a "normal" OS. However, I doubt a lot of people would be willing to make such a change if there is no perceptible gain or immediate need.
I just switched to using Ubuntu from Windows XP, here's what I found:
Pro's of Linux
Linux is less likely to be affected by viruses. I lost some time to viruses when I used XP.
As you said, same environment as Dev/QA/Prod which is nice. It's no longer a change of mindset when I connect to one of those machines
Linux is more stable. I usually rebooted XP every week or two.
You get to use the unix tools (find, pkill, grep, etc.). Cygwin is a workaround but seems quite a bit slower than running unix natively.
Performance seems quite a bit better on Linux. This is probably the biggest win for me, I have a memory-intensive Dev environment.
Cons of Linux
Open Office is a bit of a shock to the system compared to Word/Excel (which I have been using for many years).
I miss Notepad++
I need to run VirtualBox to host my local Sql Server Dev database
I need to run VirtualBox when running internet explorer
More of a pain to copy/paste text between Sql Server Management studio and IE if needed because they run in VirtualBox
Remote Desktop is more of a pain. Microsoft's remote desktop allowed me to not have to log out from work before working at home and vice versa
I have one app that only runs with the Wine emulator and won't work at all for me when remote desktop-ing on linux
I agree with the poster who said it's good to give developers a choice - they will appreciate that instead of having one or the other OS rammed down their throats. An added benefit is that you'll then be able to differentiate the good devs from the bad :) Just kidding.
On my first employment, we had been working on HP UX systems. So I really learned love the power of the console and it's elegance:
Use find to work on loads of files
less for really big log or data files without delay
for loops with substring handling to rename thousands of files in seconds.
and many other nice shell hacks to save you time and nerves...
But not many people seemed to agree in my later employments...
However. I only once had the posibility to use a Fedora Linux box for development several years ago. It was a 64 bit system in the first years of their existance. Maybe this was the problem. I was looking forward to use a proper shell again, but was disapointed as Eclipse did not run stable and had a lot of bugs. This was a pitty and a no go. Since then I never again had the chance to use linux as development OS.
As I start to work in a new employment in some days I really think about to give it an other try. Would do you think, is it still unstable? I nearly can't imagine.
You won't have to use Visual Studio.
Since that doesn't seem to be an issue for you, you might provide more details---what languages are you developing in? If it's Java, then you'll be spending most of your time in Eclipse, Netbeans, etc., so it really won't make much difference. What is your budget for the changeover, or what savings do you hope to get?
From your reasons it seems that you're pretty commited to UNIX already.
Why not give the developers a choice?
git runs faster.
...
Okay, not that much of an advantage...
Linux boxes are easier to containerize with solutions like Docker so that you can more easily share your environment with other devs or QA.
Also, if you need multiple boxes talking to each other for your dev setup, then Linux is a more practical solution. I was working on a Windows machine with a .Net solution which had to talk to services on a different box. I chose to install a couple of VM's using the steps described here (http://mytakeon.it/the-complete-steps-to-having-a-virtual-box-up-and-running-on-your-computer/). The Linux VMs were so light weight, easy to manage and faster in booting up.

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