The Mouse Organ

I've been setting up a Subversion server. My company has traditionally used VSS without much issue for years, which is amazing considering how flakey and half-arsed it is. So, as I needed a source control management system that could be accessed from other physical locations, and that had a reasonable level of functionality, I decided to leave VSS behind and go to Subversion.

So, installing Subversion took about 2 hours.

1. Get the the Win32 binaries
2. Install them on the server (just a test box for now)
3. Get TortoiseSVN binaries
4. Install them on the client
5. Run the Subversion dedicated server (can't be bothered to install Apache)
6. Point the client at the server
7. Spend the rest of the morning importing some repositories and getting used to it

So then I think to myself "This really needs to be secure before it goes onto a public server with real source code." Looking at the documentation, I needed to setup SSH on the server. No hope! I spend about 10 hours going around in circles - none of the how-to's I could find were consistent with what actually happens.

Plan B. Install Apache. Configure it to work with Subversion. Job done. Took about an hour.

Right, now to secure it with SSL. Should be easy as the user community for Apache is even bigger than that for Subversion. Download a mod_ssl binary (Apache refuse to distribute the binary because of America's export laws). Was it easy? No! 3 days of hair pulling. Everything looks like it should work (I even recruited an Apache guru friend to check my configuration), but it falls over silently on boot. I was convinced it was some sort of problem with the keys or my configuration files.

You know how you get into a state of mind with a problem where you only look at a subset of possible solutions, and you try those repeatedly, even though you know that there are other options? I finally decided to remove everything and start again with a single binary distribution of Apache that included SSL. Suddenly, everything sprung into life.

Oh well. Works a treat now. I'm just waiting for the red-tape to part and allow me to buy a server for this. Kind of tricky to work together with a team 2,000 miles away without common source.