Subversion on GoDaddy shared hosting

For better or worse, I’ve been using GoDaddy shared hosting for my personal hosting needs for nearly a year.  It’s cheap and cheerful, with plenty of disk space, bandwidth, SSH access, and easy access to a number of popular open-source apps you can test out with GoDaddy’s hosting connection.  Of course, it does have its drawbacks, and one of the major ones for me has been the nonexistence of a subversion client in the shell environment.

GoDaddy also doesn’t provide a compiler, so building from the source isn’t a possibility.  I read a post suggesting it might be possible to use a binary and decided to give it a shot.

Poking around, I noticed my server was an X86 running CentOS 5.2 (which is essentially RHEL), so downloaded the CollbNet RedHat binary.  The binary was packaged as a RPM file, so I used another machine to unpack it:

rpm2cpio CollabNetSubversion-client-1.5.6-1.i386.rpm | cpio -id

The package I used only included the subversion client.  It also came with some PDFs, man pages, install scripts, and other unnecessary bits which I was able to pare down.  I transferred the leftovers to my GoDaddy home directory, changed some environment variables, and voila – it worked!

If you’re in the same boat, you can download a TAR with everything you need here.

Here’s a step-by-step to get it working from the command line:

1. Download the TAR to your home directory:

   wget http://www.erikfantasia.com/download/godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz

2. Unzip and unpack the archive:

   tar zxvf godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz

3. If you haven’t adjusted your default .bashrc file, you can move the included bashrc.svn to overwrite your existing file:

   mv bashrc.svn .bashrc

   Or append the following to your existing .bashrc:

   export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/svn/bin
   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/svn/lib

UPDATE – thanks to Alin for pointing out this will only work for repositories hosted with HTTP/HTTPS.  GoDaddy appears to be blocking the svnserve port 3690.

New York, New York

Blogging has been a bit slow lately, mainly because of all the hectic things surrounding our sale of AeroDiet/Calorie-Count.com to About.com (Press Release).

Instead, I’ve been in the process of furiosly sorting out all the various unglamorous bits involved in selling a company – accounting, legal agreements, taxes, documents, etc etc.  Not to mention the move to New York, finding an apartment, assembling furniture, figuring out how the subways work (uptown, downtown, motown?)…it’s all been quite a grand adventure.

Luckily, I’m now fairly settled both in terms of work and home, as a shiny new employee of About.com (but still getting to do the same things I know and love) and a brand new resident of Long Island City, New York.  Phew!

Timezone Peculiarities

I just had a minor freakout trying to figure out how a number of servers I maintain running London time suddenly started reporting time Eastern +6 hrs (instead of +5 as it usually is). Had the daily sync with the NTP server gone wrong? Were my clocks wrong? Am I going crazy?

Then, of course, I bothered to look at the timezone code, noticed it had switched from GMT to BST, and realized clocks in England today switch to BST (British Summer Time).

I always wondered why daylight savings times have to switch on completely different dates/times all over the world. For example, this year BST starts at March 26 01:00 GMT, whereas most of America will switch to Daylight time on April 2 at 02:00 LST (local standard time).

The answer appears to be that convention is dictated by governments, and before the Uniform Time Act of 1966 in the US, this even went down to the state level. Indiana, a state split into two different timezones, used to have some counties in both timezones practicing DST and others not (this is finally being resolved this year when the entire state starts following DST).

It’s a real mess trying to keep track of all this. Can’t we just get some international body to decide all this stuff?

Wikipedia