SVN, Apache2 on Debian.

One of my duties at work involve maintaining an SVN server. The machine had an old FC1 distribution, and I have never felt really comfortable in that machine. I always felt the commands like yum, rpm etc were painful. Since I recently switched to Debian Sarge at home, and felt confortable maintaining it, I decided it was time to upgrade the server as well. This series of posts is not about Debian install (which is straight forward), but about getting svn, apache2, php, mysql etc working in that machine.

Note : I had unrestricted access to the debian mirrors and a few other hosts on the internet. I have no idea how tough it would be to install these without the network connection, but, if I had to guess, I would say it would be mighty tough.

SVN is an open source version control system that aims to solve some of the problems present in CVS. I had switched to SVN about an year back (I used to use CVS before that). SVN can be run on top of Apache to serve files, and can use the authentication mechanisms supported by Apache. Makes life easy for me. SVN/Apache allow me to specify the access permissions in a simple text file whereas with cvs, I would have had to manage permissions with “chmod” stuff.

It is better to compile/install apache first, and subversion later. I found this out the hard way.

Step 1: Installing Apache2

Installing Apache 2 in debian is as simple as issuing an “apt-get install apache2″ command from a root window. (Assuming, of course, the sources.list file is populated properly. Here is a link to a post I wrote on this). However, the default install did not support DAV, which is necessary for SVN. Solution ? compile Apache from the sources.

Apache2 source can be downloaded from http://apache.mirrors.tds.net/httpd/httpd-2.0.55.tar.bz2 . Extract the sources from the archive, and configure it using the command
./configure –enable-dav –enable-so
–enable-dav is to enable dav support needed by svn.
–enable-so is to enable modules support (needed by php).

After this (which will take a while to execute), issue a “make” command and then, as root, a “make install”. This will install apache to /usr/local/apache2.
Apache can be started using the command “/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start”.

Step 2 : Installing SVN
It is better to download the svn sources and compile the binaries yourself. The source can be downloaded from http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.2.3.tar.bz2 . Extract the sources from the archive.

Compiling and installing subversion can be achieved by issuing these commands
$ cd subversion-source-dir
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure –with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/pxs
$ make
# make install

After these, configure apache as mentioned in subversion documentation. Thats it !

Moving on……

The lack of support for categories has made it painful to use blogspot. I find it a lot easier to write when I can categorize it. Even forking is merely a workaround, not a complete solution. I dont want to maintain three different blogs.

Almost by accident, I discovered wordpress. Flock helped. And, here is the address of the new blog. Updates will be made only to the new blog, unless something drastic forces me to look for another change.

Clarke is out….

Everyone, with the probable exception of Michael Clarke himself, knew it was coming. After a golden start, with centuries in the first away and home tests, the golden boy of Australian Cricket was wondering where his next run would come from. The struggle started in the tour of New Zealand, continued through the Ashes (the 91 in the second innings at Lords being the sole exception), and has resulted in his expulsion from the test team. A cold decision from the selectors, but probably a justified one.
What took Australia to the top was not long term punts, but rather, cold calculations. The blokes who dared to drop Steve Waugh from the one day team should not have hesitated to drop Clarke earlier, probably ahead of Martyn (who was at the receiving end of a few dubious decisions in England, none such coming to the aid of Clarke). With Hussey performing so well, and Langer set to return to the team, with Hodge scoring runs and Symonds not getting enough of a chance, the only player who had to go was Clarke.
The ball is now in his court. It has been mentioned elsewhere that he can seek advice from any of the top 6 in the current Aussie lineup (Hodge, Hussey excluded) on how to get back into the team. No one doubts the future of the young man. He just needs some time to sort his game out, identify what is wrong, and take corrective action. We will see him back in the squad before long, and he would be better then. While the spark that Clarke brings would be missed, it is likely to be brighter in the future because of this move.

Discovery

One of my hobbies is to try out new programs. Some random surfing led me to Flock . From the website, seemed interesting. Registered my mail id at the site, and forgot all abt it for a while. Then, out of the blue, got a mail from flock.

A new public beta was available, and the link was given. Downloading and installing it was over in a jiffy, and I must admit, it seemed tailored to those who blog ! But, somehow, it did not work with the blogs I have on blogspot, and because of this, I lost interest in flock.

For no reason, I started flock again today, and tried to write something into my blog. Did not work. Was fiddling around with some menus n stuff, and then, got to a page where it said “WordPress”. Me clicked on it, and got a page which said “WordPress blogs available for flock users !”. Me was surprised.

Anyway, signed up, got a blog, and pleased to discover that it supports categories as well. If this works well, I will move my blogs from blogspot to wordpress.