Geek Pop Quiz!

[theweaselking]

You have:
* nigh-infinite space on a Linuxalike web cluster
* the PHP version and configuration of your choice
* MySQL
* Perl
* Java
* no root access, sorry.

You want:
* A subversion server. As in, the repositories are hosted on said cluster and you connect with a standard SVN client.

What do you do?

Comments

[dolston.livejournal.com]

If I am your employer, tell you to figure it out but only after giving you an unreasonable deadline.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Or one that's already past!

But no, my clients are not crazy enough to want a subversion repo on a remote web cluster. A friend of mine, however, *is*.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

Sell / Trade / Sub-let access to what's in Column A to raise capital to acquire what is in Column B.

It's highly probable that Google's web/public interface can be said to be Turing-complete; That doesn't mean someone is going to /seriously/ implement Windows on it.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Ask you or one of my other friends who does this professionally. :P

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the problem is that my answer is, roughly, "Why would you want to do that? That's a might crazy, there!"

[kadath.livejournal.com]

See, this why I would ask a professional first.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

Move the account to Joyent, where they do that sort of thing all the time? (I dunno, I've been with them since they were TextDrive and *everybody* got a repo with an account. I had no idea what to do with mine at the time.)

[skington.livejournal.com]

Start svn up, serving http on a >1024 port? (I forget whether svn+ssh can take an alternative port number.) I presume that compiling svn and getting it to start up somewhere inside your home directory are feasible?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That, or ask the person with root access to install it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"You don't have root" includes "root will not do you any favours because you are an insignificant user monkey"

Hey, for $1.50/mo, you gets what you pays for.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i was afraid of that.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But the price is right.

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

Is there a way to get a virtual server to run under the permissions you do have, inside which you have root?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You tell me!

(No, I don't think so - not usefully, anyway)

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

Can you ssh into the linuxalike server? If so, just use svn+ssh. Works nicely, no need for root access.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No, you cannot. You can probably cheat and use PHP+Perl to get yourself a command line, but that stops being "easy" and starts being "annoying"

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

Masturbate.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

That's our answer to everything!

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

*your

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Excellent plan. Doesn't solve the problem, but certainly makes you feel better.

[the-trav.livejournal.com]

use GIT

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

While this does not in fact meet the project requirements, it may be a more sensible solution.

[the-trav.livejournal.com]

Why do they want to use a clustered environment? Just to make it fast and accessible? GIT provides both of those things and a heap more...

Are they doing it for backups? That's also done by GIT and many other options...

A quick google provides: http://www.wandisco.com/subversion/clustering/
If they're going to insist on doing silly things point them to a commercial offering

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

They want to use the cluster because they have web space on a commercial hosting cluster and figure that making it a host for their code would be a useful addition.

No, really, that's it. They already HAVE the web space, and want a code repo there because backups and availability are no longer their problem at that point.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Backups aren't really an issue for version control, though - even if the central repository goes down, chances are you've got it all checked out on other machines. Even if you have to mix and match between different machines because different people were working on different parts of the repository, that only makes it slightly annoying, which is a lot better than impossible.

[vagabond27.livejournal.com]

Quit.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

This isn't a work thing. "Quitting" involves telling the guy who asked me how to do it "Sorry, I don't see an easy way. Too bad, so sad, use a local server and rsync up the repository nightly as a backup"

[quotation.livejournal.com]

Does this provider even allow rsync? I've been looking for one that does. . . .

As to whether you can do it, yes, you can. You can get qemu running and then stuff -- but you'll get caught and booted in WAY less time than it would take to set it up.