Tag Archives: linux

SVN: How do you use svn command line on Windows with ssh tunneling?

3 Replies

If you ever used svn command line, you know it is not optimal to type in your password every time you do checkout, checkin, info, etc.  In linux world, it is very easy to setup keys to get around this.  Of course in the world of Windows it is not as easy.  Here are the steps you need to follow to get private/public keys working with your SVN under Windows using ssh tunneling.

Assumptions:  you will be connecting as user “root” to svn server located at “10.0.0.1”.  All your files will be saved at c:\ including your svn command line utility

First we will have to generate a key.  We can accomplish this by using a free utility called puttygen.  Run puttygen and click on “Generate” button.  You will have a key similar to below example:

Example of a key generated by puttygen

Example of a key generated by puttygen

Copy this, you will need it in few mins.  At this point, go ahead and create a private key by clicking on:  “Save private key”.  Save this as private.ppk on your C:\. 

Now let us log in to the svn server and add this public key to the authorized_keys2 (see setting up keys for step by step instructions).  I will assume you are using “root” as login.

vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Make sure when you paste, it is not broken into different lines.  All of the key should be one line.

Ok now back to your Windows machine.  Now we need to set up ssh tunnel to our server.  There are few ways of doing this but for our purpose, we will use another free program provided by the same developers as puttygen: download plink to C:\.  If you do not do this step, you will get following error:

svn: Can't create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.

Ok let us set the variables for svn.  Go to command prompt and type (you can also set this in your scripts and inside windows environment.  But since this post is to show you an example, we will just do this):

set SVN_SSH="/plink.exe" -i /private.ppk -l root

Now let’s run this one time manually to cache key:

/plink.exe -i /private.ppk -l root 10.0.0.1

Press “y” when it asks you to save.  Type exit and get back to your prompt.

Ok now we can test our svn utility.

/svn info svn+ssh://10.0.0.1/svn/testrepo/trunk/

This should display output similar to:

Path: trunk
URL: svn+ssh://10.0.0.1/svn/testrepo/trunk
Repository Root: svn+ssh://10.0.0.1/svn/testrepo
Repository UUID: b9143312-b1a1-11ba-a111-11cdcd1d2222
Revision: 10
Node Kind: directory
Last Changed Author: root
Last Changed Rev: 4
Last Changed Date: 2008-11-18 15:18:47 -0800 (Tue, 18 Nov 2008)

Now you are ready to script your checkouts, do checkin’s with out having to type in your password, etc.

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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

Linux: How do you find out what your server’s outgoing ip is?

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There are many times when I needed to find out my outgoing (or external) IP for the servers which are behind load balancers or firewalls.  I used to just login to another external server from the server in question and find out by looking at “who” what my external ip is.  Even though it works and I am so used to it, today I decided to figure out a more graceful way of finding my outgoing ip.  As most of us already know, whatismyip.com is the quickest way to find out your outgoing ip from the browser.  So I decided to use the same way on the servers.  So I issued a wget:

wget http://www.whatismyip.org

Well that does the trick.  But being lazy as I am, I did not want to have to cat the output file to find out the ip (plus there is no point of creating extra files and doing extra work to remove them).  So if you are ssh’ed in, you can issue following command (I am sure there is another way of doing it, but this is the quickest way I could think of):

wget -q -O - http://www.whatismyip.org

-O tells wget to redirect output to the following file (- being the standard out ).  So it basically echo’s output to our console.

-q makes wget run in  quiet mode so you do not see all of the connection/download/etc output.

That is it!  I am curious to know what other ways people use to get the same information.  Please share your way if possible.

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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

Linux: yum options you may not know exist.

7 Replies

Most of the users who work with distributions such as: centos, fedora, redhat, etc use yum as a package update/installer. Most of them know how to do “yum update [packagename]” (to update all or [certain packages]) or they do “yum install packagename” to install certain package(s). But yum can do so much more. Here are some options you may find useful:

Following command will search for the string you specified. Generally this will give you all of the packages which has specified string in title or description. Most of the time you will have to look through a lot of output to find what you are looking for.

yum search string

Probably one of the most important options for yum is provides/whatprovides. If you know what command you need, you can find out what package you have to install in order to have that command available to you.

yum provides (or whatprovides) command

Following command is same as above but with less output.

yum -d 1 provides command

So for example if you are trying to figure out what you need to install to use bunzip2, type:

yum -d 1 provides bunzip2

you will get a similar output as below.

# yum -d 1 provides bunzip2
bzip2.x86_64 1.0.2-13.EL4.3 base
bzip2.x86_64 1.0.2-13.EL4.3 base
man-pages-fr.noarch 0.9.7-13.el4 base
man-pages-ja.noarch 20050215-2.EL4.3 base
man-pages-pl.noarch 0.23-5 base

As you can see bunzip2 is part of bzip2 package. So now you can you just install bzip2.x86_64 to get bunzip2.

To learn more about what else is available, read man yum.