Sourcefusion

Surely, when you claim there is no information to be found, you run across multiple examples when hunting down something else. Nice write ups are here, here and here.

After getting things up and running, I had a look with the OSX SVN client I find the most intuitive, Versions. However, whenever I tried to commit, I got an authorization failure. Whether from Versions on the machine where the repository resides or from Coda or the command line on the working machine, every commit resulted in an error code 170001.

After many hours of plodding I decided to throw away the initial repository and created a new one. No solution. Then I found this:

…..

svnserve.conf should look like this:

[general]
anon-access = read
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd
# authz-db = authz
realm = My Repository

And in this example, I have a password file named “passwd”. That should
have this:

[users]
japruim = mypass

…..

and decided to create minimal file copies of the files, rather than modify the extensively commented ones. After a restart of svnserve, the commits went without a glitch.

Every now and then I get the urge to build another website. This time I decided to take the professional route and put everything in SVN. Very nice but that means I need to get my SVN server up and running. Nice to see that I no longer need to rely on Fink or MacPorts, but that Snow Leopard comes with a very recent version.

Setting up a project repository is usually a one off action and since it’s on my local network I don’t really bother with Apache front ends and authentication, so svnserve suffices. But it always takes a lot of time to wade through the documentation to figure out what to do, so I’m writing it up here for next time.

Create a new repository:

cd /location/of/svn_repositories
svnadmin create PROJECTNAME

Create the trunk directory:

svn mkdir -m "Initial project root" file:///absolute/path/to/location/of/svn_repositories/PROJECTNAME/trunk

Check out the trunk in the local copy directory:

svn checkout svn://svnhost/PROJECTNAME/trunk .


However, the last command timed out. It took a while to figure out why: Snow Leopard’s firewall. It’s nice that you can add applications that are allowed access, but what if you can’t select /usr/bin/svnserve from the file dialog box? After much fiddling I figured out that I could drag the application from the Finder to the application list in the firewall settings. But that didn’t work.

Finally I decided to download Waterroof, a nice front end to the old network based firewall. Adding a rule was simple, but it still didn’t work.

Console gave a clue: Waterroof allowed the incoming connection and the standard firewall denied it. So much for Apple’s firewall. I turned it off and things are back to what I expect them to be.

O, big reminder to myself: don’t forget the . after the svn checkout <url> or you’ll end up with a directory ‘trunk’ in your local copy which is not what I want.

All the recommendations for Organic Groups (OG) made me curious. Can I use them for my purposes and safely hand over part of the responsabilities of managing restricted content?

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The current configuration includes many modules, a.o. I18n, Content Access, Views and CCK. With these I’m able to define roles, grant restricted access to nodes based on roles and keep the site bi-lingual (Dutch and English, with the largest part of the content in Dutch). This works fairly well.

On the other hand, assignment has to be done by hand. I haven’t figured out yet how to grant permission to another user to just restrict content to one particular role and I guess I need to build a custom View to see which nodes are restricted, i.e. build my own administrative views. As said before, it’s easy to make a mistake and grant the wrong role to a user. I also haven’t looked into the Drupal forum to see if role-based restrictions are possible. Just had a quick look: the Forum Access module and Content Access are recommended for restricted forums (the first one also allows the setup of moderators).

Although I subscribe to the ideas in the book (see my previous post) that you need to write user stories and follow an architectural approach, my main goal here is to see whether Organic Groups provide features I need in the next version of my website.

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Summer holidays is an excellent time to do some major work on my pet project. Sitting in the shade with cool drinks at hand I started to read a book on Drupal I came across some time ago. This book, Leveraging Drupal: Getting your site done right, turned out to be amazing. It not only explained best practices on how to configure your Drupal site, but, more importantly, how to setup a development environment. Been there, done that and already suffered from bad decisions such as not putting everything in SVN. It’s not feasible right now to do it ‘right’ with a flaky wireless internet connection, but I’ll definitely look into it as soon as I get home.

That didn’t stop me from working on a new theme, which is almost done by now. So with a few days to spare, I decided to look into some other issues, such as the best way to provide private content on the website.
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The update to Wordpress 2.7 goes as painless as described in the docs. However, after importing and editing posts, I always end up with an 500 internal server error. Haven’t found the cause yet. Happens with both a manual upgrade and a clean install from an Installtron script in Plesk. Strange thing is it happens only with the imported posts, not with the newly created ones.

In an attempt to update Drupal to it’s latest version (6.5) I decided to test it on my local setup. Lo and behold, I got an ‘Access denied’. After testing out several possible causes, I googled around.

The answer: a few days ago I setup an SMB share on my home folder, with access for only my user account, no access for ‘everyone’. That resulted in a permissions change on my home folder, even after removing the SMB share.

The solution: sudo chmod o+rx [home folder]

Something I never experienced on my local setup suddenly happened on the production site: random white pages. Consistent in that it was always the same pages (e.g. admin/build/modules), but random because most content pages would show up fine and many admin pages as well.

Digging aroung showed an error in the Apache log:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted

I found the answer here: http://drupal.org/node/76156. I added an appropriate ini_set line to settings.php and suddenly my admin/build/modules page showed up.

Finally I thought it was time to move my Gallery2 configuration + albums to the production site. This time making sure that I took the necessary precautions.

Yes, it was uploaded without errors and yes, I could switch off maintenance mode and yes, I could see my pictures and enter the site admin mode etc. Read more »