Desktop switch

Background

When I started my current role, I had never worked from home before. So I’m pretty clueless as to the best way to do this. I’ve got a LOT of work to do in order to have a respectable home office. But one thing I realized pretty quickly was that I would like to dedicate my work laptop as a work computer, but still use my home computer for my personal tasks. But I do not want to have multiple monitors, keyboards, mice, etc.

So I am currently using my laptop (which is a BEAST) as a VNC server and connect to it from my home computer.

Issue

I have noticed that sometimes (and oddly only sometimes) my work laptop “feels” laggy. The thing is very powerful, so I do not suspect it is truly bogged down but rather that VNC is not rendering it quickly enough. This hypothesis is strengthened by the occasional pixelated rendering. So I have come to suspect network speed. My laptop is connected wirelessly and my home computer is wired in. Here is some iperf output for your viewing pleasure:

$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.20 port 47838
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-13.6 sec  21.5 MBytes  13.3 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.20 port 47848
[  4]  0.0-13.2 sec  4.50 MBytes  2.85 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.20 port 47850
[  4]  0.0-11.6 sec  10.2 MBytes  7.41 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.20 port 47852
[  4]  0.0-10.2 sec  22.1 MBytes  18.2 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.20 port 47854
[  4]  0.0-11.2 sec  9.88 MBytes  7.38 Mbits/sec

You can see from that output that those speeds are all over the place and totally inconsistent.

Fix

So I have repurposed an old 802.11g wireless router which isn’t used anymore, but that already has a gigabit switch. I slapped DD-WRT on it (for no real reason…I’m pretty sure I won’t need the additional functionality) and disabled wireless on it. Now check out the speeds:

$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.239 port 53416
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   841 MBytes   703 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.239 port 53418
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   860 MBytes   720 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.239 port 53420
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   872 MBytes   730 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.239 port 53424
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   854 MBytes   715 Mbits/sec
[  4] local 10.10.10.9 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.239 port 53430
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   869 MBytes   728 Mbits/sec

BOOM that’s a huge increase in speed. Now if my laptop-through-VNC feels sluggish, I will have to look somewhere else because the network speeds between the VNC server and client are incredibly fast. Time will tell…

Side note

I realize I could have just purchased a desktop switch pretty inexpensively, but I already had this one sitting around and now I’ll get a little more life out of it.

Next steps

I recently set up pi-hole on my home network and it is serving as my DNS and DHCP server so I have to adjust my DHCP reservation for my work laptop (you may have noticed the different IP addresses in the output).