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Setup ViewVC / Subversion with Apache Server on OpenSuse (2)

Ok, it is not done yet. I found another problem today.
Everything worked great in my home network. But today, when I tried to check out code from outside network, I found a problem. I didn’t open port 22 for my home server. Instead, I open a non-stand port on my router and forward traffic on that port to port 22 at my home server. But when I use svn+ssh, it seems there no way to specify port number.
After some research, I found all you need to do is to change the configuration file of the subversion on your local machine (at outside network). Open file “~/.subversion/config”, then go to section “tunnel”, add following line:

ssh_home = $SVN_SSH ssh -p 12345

Port 12345 is the non-standard port opened on my router. Then on my local machine, I use this command to check out code:

svn co svn+svn_home://myhome.com/home/svn/repos/sandbox/trunk sandbox

Problem solved!

Setup ViewVC / Subversion with Apache Server on OpenSuse

Recently I tryied to setup a development server at home. It’s pretty easy to install the subversion server since there are so many great tutorials online. I don’t want to use HTTP protocol to remote access my code repository because I always like svn+ssh better. But I do want a web interface to browse my repositories and compare the difference between reversions. So ViewVC becomes my nature choice. To be more specific, I want to be able to access the source tree from my home network freely; if from outside network, I want some basic security so that my code is not share with the whole world for free.
It’s not that hard either. But I did spend some time to figure out the security stuff. After all, I am not a system engineer. Anyway, after it is done, I restarted the Apache server, and everything worked beautifully. Actually …

Setup a Unbreakable SSH Tunnel

My company doesn’t have VPN setup. To be able to work from home, usually I have to setup a reversed ssh tunnel from office to my home server (my home router forwards port 12345 to my home server port 22) by running this command from my office machine:
ssh -R 10000:localhost:22 my.homeserver.com -p 12345
In this way, when I get to home, I can connect to my office by command:
ssh -p 10000 localhost
But the ssh session sometimes got timed-out and then I couldn’t connect back. It happened several time and I eventually got annoyed. To keep my connection always alive, I created a file ~/.ssh/config:
Host *
Protocol 2
TCPKeepAlive yes
ServerAliveInterval 60
This helped a lot. But later, my company had some network issues and sometimes the network was down for hours. This broke my tunnel again. So I went even further and tried to find a solution to always keep my tunnel up — …