Diving into Ubuntu

Finally back from León. I believe the development of the installations server was a huge success, primarily because I learned a lot of things, perhaps the most important one being the installation, configuration and twisting of SELinux of specific purposes.

Even if the work is not fully done yet, I think I will have some minutes to play with my newest interest: Ubuntu Linux. I'm interested in it not just because it looks like a very careful distribution, but also because the philosophical principles behind it are very appealing, in my humble opinion.

I asked these guys to send me some burned CDs with the distribution (a very generous offer on their side), but since I can't wait to see it running I downloaded the ISO image in order to burn it and give Ubuntu Linux a try. I'm excited!

My condolences

I would like to express my sincere condolences to half the people of the US and to the rest of the world for the very distressing victory of george w[rong] bush.

Ahead of us lie four more years of angst, fear, destruction, lies, lies, lies...

To the people that voted bush: you don't want a president, you want a cowboy. I only hope you don't regret your choice... very soon. But you will, I'm sure about that.

Subversion

Well, I've finally learned how to set up a subversion repository, browseable through http (WebDAV, as a matter of fact).

I installed it in my SuSE Linux 9.1 professional workstation, but it should be simple to repeat the procedure in other distros as well.

Packages that should be installed:

• apache2


• subversion


• subversion-server


• subversion-viewcvs

In order to access the repository through http, it is needed that the apache ServerName directive matches the URL. If the machine is used for something besides SVN, and it is not possible to use ServerName at a global level, a virtual host is going to be needed.

In /etc/sysconfig/apache2 the line APACHE_MODULES must contain the words dav and dav_svn.

I edited the /etc/apache2/conf.d/subversion.conf file to read like this:


# Example configuration for a subversion repository

# see /usr/share/doc/packages/subversion for the full documentation

#

<IfModule mod_dav_svn.c>

<Location /repos>

 DAV svn

 SVNParentPath /srv/svn/html

 # Limit write permission to list of valid users.

 <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>

  # Require SSL connection for password protection.

  # SSLRequireSSL

  AuthType Basic

  AuthName "Subversion repository"

  AuthUserFile /srv/svn/user_access/repos_passwdfile

  Require valid-user

 </LimitExcept>

</Location>

</IfModule>



Authentication permissions should be given to every user which is supposed to make changes to the repository:

# htpasswd2 -cm /srv/svn/user_access/repos_passwdfile bruno

Finally, and obviously, every repository in the machine has to be created, and permissions must be given to apache process to read and write on it:

# svnadmin create /srv/svn/html/repository

# chown -R wwwrun. /srv/svn/html/repository

And that's it! Easy, right? The repository is now accessible at http://host.your.domain.com/repos/repository