Git: private repositories on shared hosting

“You are a developer, software engineer, web designer, text writer… You want your files accessible from all the places (like a source for your project or a template for a website) – and you want to be sure that it is always the most up to date version…

Sure you can drag those files along on a USB stick and copy it forth and back. You have those files even if there’s no Internet access. Important? Sure but…”

Remember this? I have written very similar article on using Bazaar-NG for private repositories on shared hosting. It is time to make the same with git – which is becoming very popular due to its robustness and support from Linus and kernel devs themselves.

With MinGW Git port (no need for Cygwin!) coming to the light – git now looks as a great alternative to both Subversion and Bazaar.

Update:  With latest release a preliminary support for git-svn has been brought!

Let’s get things started.

On SATA/PATA, libata and JMicron controllers

This might be useful for all of you oldtimers

I had an IDE HDD and IDE DVD drives connected on one stripe. The HDD was in the middle and the DVD was at the end of the cable due to “internal architecture” in my computer case. Again HDD was selected as a master and DVD as a slave using switches on the drives. Just like you’d do this in the old, <=UDMA33, times.

Everything went smoothly until I’ve upgraded my motherboard (+ CPU + RAM) to Asus P5B-V like six months ago. I’ve connected both drives to the single available IDE slot without changing their config.

Lately I’ve noticed “host 80-wire cable detection failed” messages in my logs (kernel 2.6.23) and wanted to switch completely to libata — as I have also bought a new SATA drive.

To my disappointment the pata_jmicron kernel libata/pata driver was only detecting the DVD. HDD went into driver oblivion.

Googling around showed that some people have similar problem – but it was about pata_jmicron not detecting their IDE DVD/CD drives; no one mentioned a problem when only one of the drives was not detected.

So I asked the LKML list about the pata_jmicron. Together we came to a solution (thanks!):

The ATA66 standard (80-wire cables) always considers the last drive on the cable as master. You can change it with switches and it will work… with old ATA driver. This is not the case with new libata. It conforms to the standard.

Conclusion: with ATA66 always use cable-select.

After changing drives configs to cable-select (I now boot off SATA drive) everything works perfectly. Goodbye ATA, welcome libata!

Bazaar-NG: private repositories on shared hosting

You are a developer, software engineer, web designer, text writer… You want your files accessible from all the places (like a source for your project or a template for a website) – and you want to be sure that it is always the most up to date version…

Sure you can drag those files along on a USB stick and copy it forth and back. You have those files even if there’s no Internet access. Important? Sure but…

Not too handy. You always have to take care about updating files on the stick to the most recent versions, copy files, check dates and watch out that you don’t modify old files.

You know you are smarter than that! You have a shared hosting and use FTP, don’t you? The files are accessible where Internet access is, you don’t have to remember about taking USB stick with you. But.. but you still have to take care about copying good versions…

How about using an SCM/RCS tool? This would be great. However most of the tools require you to have a direct access to HTTP server configuration which, in case of shared hosting, is out of the question. A lost battle? Not necessarily…