MobaXterm and Everything — Part 1

The last post I made here was 2009?   I must be having fun.

I’ve kept busy on a Corporate Blog for  Business Intelligence, but that isn’t really appropriate for my personal projects.   I’m really happy to be back on WordPress … the corporate blog looks like a ransom note.   WordPress is so much easier and a more satisfying place to work.

This past week, or has it been two … I forget … I’ve been inspired by some fresh tools.

I’m a large system performance guy, but in the corporate world, I spend a great deal of time on Windows.   I’m always looking for ways to make it more efficient, so I dropped my own dime to upgrade the laptop:  additional real memory and a solid state disk make the system more enjoyable, for now.

Here’s what captured my imagination:

1. Search Everything from voidtools.
   Been using it for years, and I couldn’t live without this tool.
   It’s almost impossible to hide things from myself anymore.
   I needed that same search efficiency spread across multiple Windows machines in our corporate server farm.Everything allows you to start a server instance, and export the search capability as a web page or an ETP/FTP server.Very cool … now I can find out what is on these machines without having to login.
2. mobaXterm is a light weight ToolKit that is extremely fast.  It immediately replaced all of the previous ways I used to connect with my system petting zoo.  That’s impressive.  It’s not  easy to give up doing things “the old way”.

• Remote DeskTop .  Much faster, more convenient, in a single window.
  ssh, Putty, X-Windows to unix servers.
  A side-bar allows you to locate,review,edit files using an sftp connection, automatically established as part of the login.
• Launch X-Win apps on Unix, like Firefox, Thunderbird, desktops.
  Automatically handled with X11-Forwarding to the MobaXterm X-server.  Secure connections with no pesky passwords to slow me down.
• Local apps, running under a bash shell, than allows great flexibility.
  These are all “portable apps”, so the environment launches instantly.
• Plugins done right.
  Just package the binary and supporting files into a .zip file, and it becomes part of the MobaXterm eco system.   move/remove the plugin file, and the server is instantly reconfigured.

Oh boy, what fun.    Look at the embedded video at the bottom of MobaXterm home page.  The performance and responsiveness displayed in that demo are real.  This baby is fast.  It excites the imagination.

MobaXterm Installs instantly and even imported all of my SecureCRT sessions to existing systems.   MobaXterm  sessions are much more convenient.  X11 services are secure, encrypted and automatic.

Within an hour, I enhanced this already-rich environment with some essential tools I needed:  7Zip and  Everything.  Both are portable.

Creating the 7Zip.mxt3 plugin file was done in a single command:

7za a -tzip -mx=9 \
/d/mobaXterm/7zip.mxt3 \
bin/7za.exe \
bin/es.exe \
bin/Everything.ini \
bin/Everything.exe

Restart mobaTek ( seconds ), and I have everything I need (pun intended).

My goal is to create a 4-server window in mobaTek, and use “Everything” to search for files on 4 windows boxes simultaneously.  Type a single query and all machines search for the same thing.  Much quicker than having to login to each of the servers, and it doesn’t tie up a login that would block others.
See the mobaXterm demonstration.

As it turns out, I have to do a bit more work to accomplish the simultaneous search.  I pulled on a  thread of my Windows Development environment ( posted here in 2009) and nothing worked.  It was a good thing.  I trashed the 4 “almost compatible” environments and recreated a more robust development environment that allows me to create Windows native whiz-bangs … which I can package as MobaXterm plugins or portable Windows apps.

Wow … I’m excited.  Now, back to work.   Miles to go before I sleep.

I’ll describe how I rebuilt my dev environment later.  It is a much smaller post.

“Make me one with everything”  — Buddhist monk to a hot dog vendor

“The hardest thing about writing is writing”
— Nora Ephron  May 19, 1941 – June 26, 2012