Production and Development, SSH, Quality and Testing

So I have my two environments up and running. What I need to do now is get them aligned so I can do proper testing in the dev environment before moving the files to prod with a minimum of trouble. So, I have my dev environment on a vm on my laptop. i can access prod from the laptop or desktop via the drupal web interface. I can also access it via SSH and aptana. that’s the way that i can upload the code to prod. but i need to be able to access the dev code consistently from the desktop (the vm is on the laptop and the files are too big to move around).

so i need to be able to access the laptop vm from the desktop. and since they (desk n vm) are on different networks i have to route packets from the vm network to the home wireless network. otherwise, i’m going to have to sync the code files from the desk to the lap, upload the files on the laptop to the vm for testing, then upload from desk to prod via ssh. i think that i might try to get SSH running on the vm centos install then make it accessible to the desk. that would also closely mimic prod. that’s the ticket.