Current mood:

accomplished

using synergy for sharing mouse and keyboard

I'll be using two computers quite a lot this month, so I set up Synergy this morning. It took me a while to figure out how to make it work in my office. Maybe my experience will be helpful to others.

I haven't been able to get domain names working on my home network, so I have to talk to my systems by IP address. My mouse and keyboard are attached to eddie; marvin is the client. The Synergy troubleshooting page shows the errors I was seeing: "Server already has a connected client with name 'XXX'" and "Server refused client with name 'XXX'." But it was only by trial and error that I figured out I need to register my client by IP address and set up an alias for the IP address to the client name. Here's the config that works:

 

section: screens
        eddie:
        Top:
        10.100.326.102:
end
section: links
        eddie:
                up = Top
                right = 10.100.326.102
        Top:
                down = eddie
        10.100.326.102:
                left = eddie
end
section: aliases
10.100.326.102:
 marvin
end

Then I just connect to eddie using its IP address (e.g. 10.100.326.101). I'll bet synergy would have worked out of the box if my domain name resolution was working they way it's supposed to. I know I should fix that, but for now I'm simply glad I have Synergy working.