[dundee] OpenWRT on a Linksys WAG354G

[Rick Moynihan]

2008/9/28 Philipp Geyer <nistur at googlemail.com>:
> Ok, sorry if it was a little unclear. The whole thing was because I'm
> trying to organise some sort of synchronisation of documents between my
> PC and my laptop, both running multiple OSs. If it isn't done
> automagically then it's unlikely to last all too long before I forget to
> use it and then gets abandonned.

I know the problem, but without explicitly taking care to NEVER modify
the same or in the case of code related files on both peers, then I'm
not sure how realistic it is to expect this to happen automagically
without risking the loss of changes to your data.  I think you simply
need to pop up a unison GUI everytime either of your peers connect to
your network.  (see below)

> I would also like to have source control for any programming I do, the
> university has a CVS server on their "kydd" machine that we use for our
> ps2 work (the only version control the PS2s have on them) so I'm
> familiar with that, although we can't use it outside of the university
> very easily. I have also had SVN on our ubuntu router and had a little
> play around with that, although I normally used the CVS that was also on
> it for the sole reason that I could have all my work in one place, and
> access it from any machine I'm planning on using (including the
> university PS2s)
>
> I haven't looked into distrubuted version control much yet mainly
> because for any purposes I'm planning on using it for it seems a little
> complex.

The perceived complexity of distributed versioning systems is a common
misconception.  The reason?  They don't enforce a particular topology
on you, so in terms of use cases they scale much better than
traditional client server ones.  You can literally run them in any
model, ranging from having no server, and simply maintaining
versions/branches/tags on a handful of files locally, to running them
in a client/server model like CVS/SVN, and then if you want there are
a variety of distributed models you can choose from too....

Anyway I've no experience with git on Windows, so it may or may not be
suitable, and I don't know the status of the various ports...  What I
will say though, is that git repositories can pretend to be legacy cvs
servers with git-cvsserver.  This might be handy as if you were to go
distributed with your repo's you could still use the CVS client on the
PS2's to pull/push to the repo.  I hear mercurial/hg and bzr both have
pretty good windows support, so if you're interested in using
something better than CVS/SVN these might also be an option.... but
IMHO git is the daddy here =)

> Back to the synchronisation. I considered using CVS but constantly
> adding new files, deleting them and committing seemed like a lot of
> hassle. I looked at unison but it seemed to again not be precisely what
> I want. It seemed to be more peer to peer whereas I wanted a more
> definate client/server so I wouldn't have to have my PC on to have the
> newest documents on my laptop. Unison may be able to do this but from
> what I saw it looked more complicated to do something like this than it
> would using rsync.

You're right that Unison is more p2p than rsync, but the problem is
that it sounds like you essentially want to have two peers.  As you
probably want to change documents on both the laptop and desktop and
sync files between them via the NAS device.  I'm sure this is possible
with rsync, but to me this seems more up Unison's street, as it can at
least provide a GUI or interface to let you manually resolve potential
conflicts....  i.e. what do you want to happen if you make two
different changes to the same file on both the laptop and the PC?  You
can obviously get around this issue by deciding on one to take
priority so you can automate it - but are you sure this'll be the
right behaviour for you, in every instance?

> Which leads me to the linksys router.
> As it's (currently) coping under our workload, we've indefinately
> retired the ubuntu box as it uses far more power than the tiny linksys,
> however it doesn't have any services we could use. Basically, I decided
> that what would work best was to get rsync running on a samba share on
> the router, if that would work. Possibly also some sort of version
> control to the same place, depending on whether the router can take it.
> However, I know next to nothing about the workings of the router and how
> one would go about setting the thing up, the link I sent had photos and
> diagrams of taking it apart and attaching a serial console to it...
> which I'm fairly sure would cause me to turn it into a odd shaped brick.
>
> I hadn't seen gibak (as I haven't yet looked at git much) but that's
> definately an option, although I don't really want to install cygwin to
> get the same thing working under windows... there appears to be a
> msys/mingw version...I'll have a look
>
> So yeah, I've babbled far too much again... meh, summary?
> 1) Would like to know if it's "safe" to use rsync(/git) on OpenWRT.
> 2) same as above but with CVS (still using the PS2s this year)
> 3) Are there any better suggestions than possibly burning out the router?
> 4) Can anyone lend a hand with the OpenWRT at all?
>
> Thanks again


I have no experience of OpenWRT, so can't really offer much advice
regarding it... My assumption has been that it can run Linux and GNU
tools...  So I'd assume that rsync, unison and git/svn/cvs etc...
would be able to work.  Unison shouldn't require samba, and I'd
imagine any rsync client for windows wouldn't need it either, though
you might want it simply to have easy access to the drive and it's
backups.

Oh, and if you settle on using a versioning system alongside some
kinda rsync/unison strategy, then make sure that the repositories are
ignored by it, as the potential for conflict and serious damage to the
repo's internal integrity is too great.

Let us know what route you go down and how you get on...

R.