Installing programs in different Linux machines with very limited acccess

Question

Hi,

I have to log into Linux servers from different customers and use there essential tools like SVN, etc. Most of the times I get no root access, and usually the administrator is on holidays :) so I have to get the way to use this tools there. Sometimes this is very straightforward process, just compile the code. But in some of the cases, I have to get before a lot of different tools compiled before it, so I can easily spend two hours just to get SVN compiled.

I wonder what do oyu think is the best workaround or solution for this. I thought aobut the following:

1- There is somekind of tool that can convert a RPM (or DEB or similar) packacge to a static binary with all necessary libaries, etc, included there. Even if I get a very big file.

2- If I need to use program "X", I could creat a script like call_X.sh that when invoked, uses SSH to send the input to the program "X" installed in some remote machine, do there the necessary operations, and get the resulting files back.

What do oyu think here?

Thanks

Answer 1

Rootless GoboLinux and Gentoo Prefix are both systems in which packages can be installed to a local directory without root permissions.

It's also possible to extract the contents of a .deb (dpkg -x) or .rpm (rpm2cpio | cpio -i), and you may be able to use the results with little or no modifications, depending on how they were built. klik actually automatically does this for some Debian packages.