James Washington
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Technique

Offload heavy/risky reverse engineering to a second machine

Run untrusted programs and heavy analysis on the laptop, never on the server holding the passwords.

The server in the closet

how it works

Same MCP registered twice: local for metadata reads and runtime attach, ssh-stdio remote for decompile/observe; identical home paths make file paths portable; single-arch lipo before Ghidra.

Technique: A pattern or hard-won lesson, written down so it isn't learned twice.

The code for this one lives in a private repo. This page explains the idea so you can build your own.

isolationmcpreverse-engineeringsshtechnique

related

  • rea / rea-air (remote REA over ssh stdio) MCP server Runs the reverse-engineering toolkit on the laptop so risky binaries never run on the server.
  • rea-sync Command-line tool Moves files to the laptop for heavy reverse-engineering and brings results back.
  • Scope heavy MCP servers to projects, not the user Technique Only load big AI plug-ins in the projects that use them, saving memory in every other session.
  • Homelab disaster-recovery runbook (encrypted R2 backups) Document Step-by-step instructions, readable from a phone, for getting everything back if the home server dies or email is lost.
  • One Keychain item for all shell secrets (base64 or bust) Technique Keep every API key in one locked vault instead of in shell config files, without slowing down new terminals.
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