The new office preparations are on the way. A lot of problems from the contractors, the builder and suppliers, but we are moving forward. The rains have delayed the schedules a lot – the PoP work did not dry quickly, water leakage started from the floor above ours and workers do not turn up on time. We have had to put two full time people from our side on the development site to keep track of things. Ashok has to visit the site twice every day to ensure things are going fine. Despite all this, there have been a lot of troubles.
The systems setup is moving slowly as well. The LG LCDs and VXL Thin Clients are lying at my home these days as we don’t have a place to keep them in either offices right now. We have made a move to Ubuntu as a standard platform for desktops and servers. Got the new LDAP server working yesterday. Kartik and Ali are working on SMB-LDAP and Windows integration right now. We have decided to use Webmin to manage all the internal servers. The Asterisk work is in a fix since the guy who was working on it quit the organization abruptly. Kartik is also looking into SVN setup and I am wondering if we can have multiple levels in that setup. So people first check in to their team server, and then it automatically goes to the cenral file server.
The new office is going to be pretty exciting 🙂
I don’t think multiple levels are supported out of the box with SVN or CVS. But, you can surely do this with some nifty scripting. Check in to the team server, make cron call a script every few hours which checks out the stuff and put in on the central file server. Use rcp, or scp if you’re paranoid, for the copying part. Work for us !
Thanks for the tip Sharinder. I was thinking about this option, but am not sure if we can have the revisions intact on the central server. We want the central server to act as a master SVN server – so that we can maintain all the projects there, and also check them out from there if needed. Like an aggregator of all the servers around.
It shouldn’t be just a file server – copying files to some specific folder.
Would your approach serve our purpose?
rsync all subversion project directories to the central server and make sure that you put them in a single directory exposed through apache (with the appropriate apache configs ofcourse).
Use the enforced wait / delay towards thinking about working in some scalable physical and logical security systems, including intelligent IDs. Perhaps a few webcams strewn around your workplace that external visitors could see and/or be used by employees on their blogs? Perhaps some perimeter cams for security? In addition, some ambient information displays would work for employee morale as well. Stuff like a LCD (or ten) along the walls that draws in weather / traffic information. Perhaps even making these displays open to employees as digital bulletin boards for anything from stuff for sale to personal / anonymous notes?
Humanizing the workplace has a lot of fringe benefits. Google does the free meals – you could start with some webcams and LCDs!
Hope this helps. Good luck with the new digs!
Later,
Sujeet
Ok, so rsyncing and putting in an apache frontend would do the trick! Thanks!
Hey Sujeet: good ideas! I was looking up on security systems yesterday. We have an access card system but no webcams etc. I thought that would be like evading the privacy. But I like the idea of clients being able to see the team that’s working on the project. I am also thrilled by the LCDs on the wall idea. It would rock! Let me see if we can work out the budget for that. It surely is a fantastic idea!
Nirav: Sorry didn’t read your problem carefully enough. My solution wouldn’t work in your case as the revision histories would get lost. I think Vaibhav’s solution should work.