Lately, I’ve been interested in the benefits of having a dedicated source control server.

My goals for the project:
1. Have a dedicated server to store source and other files I’m working on that could benefit from source control and a secondary backup.
2. Have the server accessible through the Internet so that friends who I am working with can access our projects.
3. The server should be as low power usage as possible.
4. Attempt to make the server as secure as possible. Probably only have one port directed to it (either the http webdav or svnserve protocols on a custom port). I might also consider having ssh directed as well so I can use something like NoMachine NX Remote Access.

Last weekend I ordered an “MSI Wind PC” computer to take on that role. This computer is sold as a barebones unit that doesn’t come with RAM or a hard disk. For about $220 total, I was able to get an ATOM based computer with a 750GB Western Digital hard drive and 1GB of ram. The main benefit of this setup should be the low power usage which I estimate to be around 25 – 35 watts. Checking an online energy cost calculator it said the device should cost around $40 a year to power (24hr a day), which isn’t bad!

This week I’ve been learning more about Subversion. I have installed a basic install of Ubuntu desktop in a Sun Virtual Box virtual machine and went through (this great Ubuntu document) to get up and running.

I also Installed The Eclipse PDT IDE (PHP) and the Subeclipse SVN add-on

Using the basic Webdav setup, I easily linked Eclipse with the repository in my virtual machine. Here is a tip with the virtual machine: Setup your network adapter as a “Bridged Adapter.” What will happen is that the VM will talk with your router directly and get its own IP address completely separate from your host OS. This way, it’s east for your host OS to talk with the VM through the network.

1149 lines of code so far. That’s not including and database file initialization code or other things such as the css for the public site.

Completed (“somewhat tested”):
- Add/edit main page links
- Add/edit/delete main page basic html content blocks
- Visual template system and the final visual look of the site.
- Public index.php looks “done” visually. The main links work and display all basic – content blocks when clicked (ordered by ‘zorder’). It’s just lacking sub links (articles and galleries).

To Be Completed:
- Delete main page links (I haven’t decided if I want it to do a recursive deletion of all content associated with it or not).
- Add/edit/delete articles (aka. multipage basic html content blocks).
- Add/edit/delete image galleries.
- Make the admin pages secure.
- Testing, testing, and more testing!

I’ve been thinking of not bothering with an image gallery aspect. The multi page articles would have similar abilities to a photo gallery. The only difference is that it could not support the thumbnail->large image functionality.

Edit: I was thinking of adding a global error handler that pipes all errors into a 50 – 100 item large database table. This table would be viewable from one of the admin pages. It would save a lot of effort debugging second-hand problem information.

Here is a sample of the site: