subversion

Why didn’t I heed my own advice?

I tried to get Subversion working at Dreamhost.

Honestly, I tried.

NFS and Subversion don’t mix.

So that makes Subversion close to useless in large computing environments which generally always run NFS to provide mounts.

It’s a miracle I am still using Subversion knowing what I’ve been through. Omg the Berkley stuff still gives me nightmares…

So I moved back my repository to Jamie’s ADSL hosted unstable box.

At least now you can see what I’ve been up to.

I am moving over to DreamHost.

My colleague says the Jmeter test on DreamHost hosted Natalian is about 10 times better than the previous test.

Several of my Web application are still hosted with Jamie’s server. On my CodeMonster account I can only seem to fully host 15 domains. So that means 15 Web applications and I have more than that, although many of them are unstable prototypes.

DreamHost seems alright after exploring the panel for a good few hours.

There does seem to be a major NFS issue regarding Subversion. That’s a pain, as that means that I can’t host my FSFS repository here on my DreamHost account.

Another element I didn’t like with the DreamHost is the amount of new accounts I had to create. I think it was 6 and that’s just one domain:
# WebID
# Spork (mail)
# pico (shell)
# DreamHost Wiki
# Stats
# Mysql

My encrypted ~/personal/accounts file is nearing 100 accounts. FFS! We need something like OpenID.

On my laptop I had trouble with Postfix again. This time getting clear SMTP Authentication to work. How many times have a I tried to migrate from Exim to Postfix? OMG. Anyway, usual story. Back to Exim4 and things work. Although I wish DreamHost would use secure SMTP. Now I have to make sure my passwords are different as my mail password is very vulnerable.

Wordpress “one click” installation just seems to untar the latest.tar.gz, so I guess I have to manage updates manually. That’s a pain. Dreamhost should use my Debian package for taking care of this problem with tons of users !

Here is some DreamHost porn to give you an idea about the DreamHost panel.

Inspired by Joey Hess in the past couple of years I have had my homedir in a subversion repositry. I tipped about this a while back, but I thought I should give the topic some blog treatment.

When I move to a new machine in $HOME:

hendry@perry:~$  ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
6c:2e:4e:8a:f2:54:b3:1a:89:25:59:65:f9:fe:1a:2f hendry@perry
hendry@perry:~$  ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_dsa.pub hendry.iki.fi
15
Password:
Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh 'hendry.iki.fi'", and check in:


.ssh/authorized_keys

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

hendry@perry:~$ svn co svn+ssh://hendry@hendry.iki.fi/home/hendry/repo/public/home .

svn: Failed to add file ’.bashrc’: object of the same name already exists

Unfortunately, this generally means I have to manually remove .bashrc, .bash_profile et al out the way and re-run the checkout a couple of times.

If I wish to read and write emails from that machine, I generally need my addressbook and mutt colouring from another private repository:

svn co svn+ssh://hendry@hendry.iki.fi/home/hendry/repo/private/Mail

I don’t keep my Maildir (mail archives) in the repo because I filter mails through Gmail and use offlineimap/mairix dumps from my IMAP server on whatever machine I read mail from. So there tends to be copies or backups of my Mail.

Browse my public repository to learn more.

It isn’t perfect.

• I often forget to commit after a change. I tried automated commits with mixed results and maybe I should again.
• I need to incorporate my favourite package listing, so I can apt-get the packages I typically need like screen, vim, irssi-text, offlineimap, mairix etc. (hmm, perhaps a Debian package for my homedir…)
• Subversion can’t handle symlinks. Arse. (Update: Oh, it can now)

I had some awful problems keeping .mozilla in there, in order to maintain my bookmarks. Now I am keeping them with delicious.

I don’t keep binary files like porn or mp3s in there. I back them up occasionally with rsync like so:

rsync -essh -rtpv ~/pictures backupmachine: