Friday 24 April 2009

E61 Mercurial Solution

Mercurial to version control files on my E61 phone. That would be sweet. I could edit text in PED then push and pull changes from my server using SSH. Only problem is that, as of writing, there is no mercurial client for the Symbian S60v3 operating system. Mercurial is a combination of Python and C code. In my dreams of spare-time nirvana I could attempt a port to S60, but realistically that isn't going to happen. I need a plan B.

Engineering Compromise

So, I'm not going to be able to have a command-line like experience of mercurial on my E61. What about the next best thing? My next idea was to use putty to: (1) ssh into a directory on my linux server (2) Update the mercurial repos there (3) Grab all the files from the linux server to the phone (4) Make edits on the phone (5) Upload the modified files back to the linux server (6) From putty on the linux server commit the changes into mercurial I've got this working. The tricky bit was to decide what to use to move the files about. I've ended up with MobyExplorer doing FTP to my local linux box. Inside the firewall I felt the FTP was safe enough. I'm a little nervous at opening up an FTP server on my public facing boxes. I had to set up secure FTP.

Secure FTP Set Up

I installed the Very Secure FTP Server (vsftpd) using aptitude. I made the following changes to the config in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (1) local_enable=YES (2) write_enable=YES (3) anonymous_enable=NO (4) chroot_local_user=YES ...then restart the server with sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

1 comment:

Dave Potts said...

I had been using the above to sync to-do lists between my phone and the web. I've since moved to google task lists and that works much better. If only there was a solution for writing small text files on the phone that synced nicely with the web. Google docs is too heavy weight to work on the phone's opera browser.