Advice on setting up a server to host source code and other documents...

Question

Hi, today we keep our documents and source code, using subversion, on a server hosted by another company out on the internet. This has worked well so far.
However, we have now gotten an office and would like to keep all the documents in-house. Now, are there any general advice for how to set up a system with a NAS-unit running Subversion and have it accessible in a secure fashion from the internet and having backups made on regular basis. And so forth...
Gazillions of startups have gone through this process and I hope someone is willing to share experiences made :-)
/John

Answer 1

Subversion with Apache2 works great and one can also setup a WebDAV on it too for sharing documents, and this works fine even over https. There are also many add-ons for subversion like WebSVN and Trac.

Answer 2

Subversion + Apache works great. My only recommendations are go for a Unix-y server (Linux usually, but OpenBSD is very light and easy to manange). Apache and Subversion are Unix tools and work best in their home environment.

For backups you can look into things like tapes, dvds or rsync.net depending on how much reliability and space you need. If you go the rsync.net way look at a tool called duplicity.

Answer 3

I'm using a Synology DS101j for a home NAS. I've "bootstrapped" it, which involves running a script to set up ipkg, a small package management program. There are myriad programs available in the (community-maintained, not officially sanctioned) repository, including SVN, which I am running currently.

For internet access, the safest bet (and what I'm doing) is to use svn+ssh with public key authentication instead of a password.

Edit in response to comment:

I'm happy with my synology. They bring out new firmwares fairly often, and they are still adding features and enhancements. It's quite hackable, with pretty decent software supplied, which works fine alongside the "hacked" software.

The box draws on the order of 25W from memory, so it's much better than a PC in that regard. Mine is the simplest possible model - it only takes one hdd, but I believe you can get models that have room for multiple drives, and they support RAID and such like.

I don't have any guides to recommend, but you should be able to find quite a bit of information just on the synology product page, on the synology forums, and just googling around.

Answer 4

I wouldn't keep these document and source code in-house unless I really had to. There are real advantages with working with web services and hosted solutions. It only becomes a problem if you're really worried about your IP or security issues.