vsbabu.org

Quick Bazaar on Windows over SSH

Quick notes on how to set up a version control system using Bazaar with just SFTP and Windows client.

• Get a Unix/Linux machine that you’ve an account and that supports SSH.
• Create a directory, say /home/loginid/repository
• On your Windows machine, download pageant.exe and puttygen.exe (at a minimum) from PuTTy site.
• Start puttygen.exe, generate your private and public key pair. Save private key somewhere. C:\Documents and Settings\\.ssh\id_rsa is a good choice. Exit puttygen.exe.
• In your server, make a .ssh directory, create a new file called authorized_keys, paste the public key into that file without any line breaks.
• Start pageant.exe. Right click on the icon (terminal with a hat) on the system tray, add key and choose the private key file.
• Download and install Bazaar Windows version.
• Start it Bzr in command line.
• Create the remote repository like bzr init sftp://username@remote/home/loginid/repository
• Create a local directory, create a repository there too.
• Add some files to local repository.
• When you want to push it up to remote, do bzr push sftp://username@remote/home/loginid/repository

For more info, read Bazaar doc.

November 26, 2009

Do not use GET for form processing!

I thought everyone knew this. But recently I went to a site -- that is written by really smart Unix guys -- and was shocked to find that every single form is posted via "GET". Not "POST". This includes login form, billing information form (yes, the one with your credit card#) etc. It is absolutely insecure. Yes, the server is under HTTPS, but that is of no use here.

Why is it insecure? When you do a GET all the parameters are in the URL, in plain text. And the URL gets stamped in your browser history, web server access logs (we may be able to assume that the server is reasonably secure) and more scarily, in the logs of any proxy servers that are in the route.

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November 12, 2009

Portable development links

• Portable Ruby installation
• Portable Cygwin
• Flash Rails
• Portable Python
• Portable JDK or Portable Eclipse with Java
• Portable Apps - Development

November 09, 2009

Wish I had this 10 years ago

Pipe Viewer via IBM dW

In 1995, I got into a data warehouse project and all the ETL was through some bunch of shell utilities followed by sql*loader. This certainly would’ve helped!

November 05, 2009

SVN client over SSH to remote Unix server from Windows

I needed to get a quick way to work with a personal version control system accessible from multiple computers running Linux or Windows. Ideally, I’d have liked to use Mercurial (light, easy, no great GUI available) or Bazaar (thicker, slower, good renaming capabilities, just about the best GUI available) or Git (fast, not a bad GUI, portable MSYS port is pretty good). However, my hosting provider provides only CVS or Subversion and I didn’t want to install any of the above ones from source under my account. Nor do I want to run any server for this. Things should work with plain SSH. Initial approach was to create an SVN repository on the server and then access this from my computers using SSH. I tried getting svn+ssh pull for all of these above and couldn’t get to work quickly enough on my Windows XP box. Had to then settle for an SVN client. Turns out that it is little tricky. Given below are the quick steps I followed to get this working.

Just a personal preference - I don’t prefer using any of the Tortoise*GUIs. GUI as such is fairly nice, but I don’t generally like installing shell extensions on Windows. Ideal solution for me would’ve been the ability for any of these to init a repository on a remote filesystem by SSH - couldn’t find it out though.

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November 02, 2009

Associate filetypes to VIM

This has to be the best VIM tip for Windows - Windows File Associations. For example:

assoc .otl=outliner
ftype outliner=c:\tools\vim\vim72\gvim.exe --remote-silent "%1"

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