Using more than one machine

One machine runs out before you do. A long build blocks everything else, or you want agents working overnight on a spare desktop while your laptop travels with you. DevThrottle was built for a fleet rather than a computer, and adding the second machine is the point where that starts to show.

This is a walk-through of the idea and the order to do it in. About twenty minutes, most of it the installer running on the second machine. You need DevThrottle working on one machine first, with a Gateway connected.

1. Understand what the Gateway shares, and what each machine needs of its own

   The shared part is the Gateway, and it is worth knowing what it holds before you add a second computer to it. It knows what every session in your fleet is doing, which is what makes one roster out of two machines. It holds what belongs to your account rather than to a desk - your model choices, your voice settings, your snooze lengths, your language, and the dictionary of your own words. It keeps your conversation history, which is how you can read back a session from a machine you are not sitting at, and how a supervising session can follow one it is driving. And it is what your phone talks to; the phone never talks to a Director.

   What is not the Gateway's is each machine's own arrangements - the Director itself, and the settings that describe that computer rather than you: its network addressing, whether it starts on boot, its diagnostics. The new machine keeps its own.

   So the work of adding a machine is telling a second computer to report to the same Gateway. The one copying job in the story is yours, and it comes later: any repository you want the new machine to work on needs its own clone there, exactly as if you were setting that machine up by hand.

2. Install on the second machine and enroll it

   Install DevThrottle there as you did the first time. The joining happens on the setup wizard's gateway step, and what you do there depends on the Gateway your first machine uses. On the hosted gateway - the recommended default - you simply sign in with the same account: the wizard enrolls the machine, and the moment it shows Connected, your two machines are one fleet. Running your own gateway? Take Self-hosted gateway instead - it scans for gateways it can reach and lets you type an address when the scan cannot see yours.

   The exact steps are on Running more than one machine. On a normal install nothing on your machine listens - the Director and the Launcher only dial out to the Gateway. The one exception is a self-hosted Gateway: the machine you install it on listens on a port (7878) and must be reachable at its address. The hosted Gateway involves no listener of yours at all.

3. Check the fleet map

   Open the Cockpit and go to the fleet map. The new machine appears as its own node with its own sessions hanging off it. If it does not appear, do not reach for the router first: enrollment can fail at the sign-in - the wizard says so plainly when it does, and keeps your options - and a machine that enrolled but has no Director running shows nothing to the fleet yet. Running more than one machine walks through what to check, in order.

4. Start something on the far machine, from where you are

   From the fleet map, start a session on the other machine and give it work. You do not need to be sitting at it. That is the whole payoff: the second computer becomes somewhere you send work rather than somewhere you go.

Next

For the setup detail see Running more than one machine, and Connecting machines without opening a port for the listener story in full - on a normal install nothing on your machine listens, and only a self-hosted Gateway's own machine does. To make the far machine work while you sleep, see Work that runs without you.