Edit files on server with Eclipse - linux

I'm trying to figure out how to do this with Eclipse. We currently run SVN and everything works great, but I'd really like to cut my SSH requests in half and use Eclipse to modify some files directly on the server. I'm using the below build of eclipse... how can I do this?
Eclipse for PHP Developers
Build id: 20100218-1602
Update
I have no intention of eliminating SVN from the equation, but when we need to make a hotfix, or run a specific report or function as a one-time thing, I'd much rather use Eclipse than terminal for modifying that kind of thing.

Have a look at How can I use a remote workspace over SSH? on the Eclipse wiki. I'm just quoting the summary below (read the whole section):
Summing up, I would recommend the
following (in order of preference):
VNC or NX when available remotely, Eclipse can be started remotely and
the network is fast enough (try it
out).
Mounted filesystem (Samba or SSHFS) when possible, the network is fast
enough and the workspace is not too
huge.
rsync when offline editing is desired, sufficient tooling is
available locally, and no merge issues
are expected (single user scenario).
RSE on very slow connections or huge workspaces where minimal data
transfer is desired.
EFS on fast connections when all tooling supports it, and options
like VNC or mounted filesystem or
rsync are not available.
But whatever you'll experiment, don't bypassing the version control system.

You could use something like SSHFS, but really, it's a better idea to use some kind of source control system instead of editing files directly on the server. If Subversion isn't sufficient, perhaps you might try a DVCS like Git or Mercurial.

Related

How to "safely" allow others to work on my server?

I sometimes have a need to pay someone to perform some programming which exceeds my expertise. And sometimes that someone is someone I might not know.
My current need is to configure Apache which happens to be running on Centos.
Giving root access via SSH on my main physical server is not an option.
What are my options?
One thought is to create a VPS (guest as Linux) on my main physical server (operating system as Linux) using virtualbox (or equal), have them do the work, figure out what they did, and manually implement the changes my self.
Seem secure? Maybe better options? Thank you
I suggest looking into the chroot command.
chroot() changes the root directory of the calling process to that specified in path. This directory will be used for pathnames beginning with /. The root directory is inherited by all children of the calling process.
This implications of this, are that once inside a chroot "jail" a user cannot see "outside" of the jail. You've changed their root file. You can include custom binaries, or none at all (I don't see why you'd want that, but point being YOU decide what the developer can and can't see.)
We can use a directory for chroot, or you could use my personal favorite: a mounted file, so your "jail" is easily portable.
Unfortunately I am a Debian user, and I would use
debootstrap to build a minimal system to a small file (say, 5GB), but there doesn't seem to be an official RPM equivalent. However the process is fairly simple. Create a file, I would do so with dd if=/dev/zero of=jailFile bs=1M count=5120. Then we can mkfs.ext4 jailFile. Finally, we must mount and include any files we wish the jailed user to use (this is what debootstrap does. It downloads all the default goodies in /bin and such) either manually or with a tool.
After these steps you can copy this file around, make backups, or move servers even. All with little to no effort on the user side.
From a short google search there appears to be a third party tool that does nearly the same thing as debootstrap, here. If you are comfortable compiling this tool, can build a minimal system manually, or can find an alternative; and the idea of a portable ext4 jail is appealing to you, I suggest this approach.
If the idea is unappealing, you can always chroot a directory which is very simple.
Here are some great links on chroot:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Change_root
https://wiki.debian.org/chroot
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/chroot-practices.html
Also, here and here are great links about using chroot with OpenSSHServer.
On a side note: I do not think the question was off topic, but if you feel the answers here are inadequate, you can always ask on https://serverfault.com/ as well!
Controlling permissions is some of the magic at the core of Linux world.
You... could add the individual as a non-root user, and then work towards providing specific access to the files you would like him to work on.
Doing this requires a fair amount of 'nixing to get right.
Of course, this is one route... If the user is editing something like an Apache configuration file, why not set-up the file within a private bitbucket or github repository?
This way, you can see the changes that are made, confirm they are suitable, then pull them into production at your leisure.

GNU make's install target to push files on a remote SSH?

I'm working on a project that needs to be tested on an embedded Linux system. After every little change, I have to scp all files to the device over a SSH connection. Can you suggest a more convenient way to deploy files on a remote target? For example some trick on make's install command:
make install INSTALL='scp 192.168.1.100:/'
or something.
if you can use scp, you can probably also use rsync, specifically rsync over ssh. Use of rsync has as advantage is that it builds a delta of source and destination files, and transfers only what is necessary. In case of transfer after changing very little this would be of considerable benefit. I'd probably invoke it if building completes without error, like make ... && upload (where upload could be a script covering the details of transfer)
Just for completeness, sshfs is often quite useful. You can mount a remote folder visible over ssh on to a folder on your local hard disk. Performance is not great, but certainly serviceable enough for a deploy step, and it's transparent to all tools.

Migrate data from one server to another

I bought a new server and I want to move all the data (directories, sub directories, users, passwords, ..etc) from my old server to it.
Is there a way to do that?
Thanks,
Do you have physical access to both servers? If so you can use the dd command to make a clone of the disk from the old server to the disk that is going into the new server.
In order to do this though, both hard drives have to be installed in one of the servers.
You can also use netcat and dd to clone a disk over a network.
for the directories and files, use a FTP client from your server, if it allows you to, if not, just download all the content to your computer and upload it to the new server.
For the users and passwords, i guess they are in a Database, connect to the database using SSH, telnet, or MysqlAdmin or any RMDB client system and export a dump file, then log in to the new server's SQL system and import that dump file.
Anyway you should give more details of both servers anyway so we can help you, for example, are they Shared hosting or dedicated machine? and what kind of access do you have to them, also, their operative system would help people to reply you accurately
In principle, yes.
If the hardware is similar (= just more RAM, disk space but same CPU architecture and no special graphics card drivers), you might be able to copy every file and then install the boot loader once more (the boot loader config usually changes when the hard disk size changes).
Or you can create a list of all services that you use, determine which config files each one uses and then just copy those. Ideally, you shouldn't copy them but compare the old and the new versions and merge them.
The most work intensive way is to use a tool like puppet. In a nutshell, puppet allows to create install scripts for services (along with all the configuration that you need). So if you need to install a service again (new hardware, second server), you just tell puppet to do it. On the plus side, your whole installation will be documented, too. If you ever wonder why something is the way it is, you can look into the puppet files.
Of course, this approach takes a lot of time and discipline, so it might not be worth it in your case. Apply common sense.

Linux: Uploading files to a live server - How to automate process?

I'm developing on my local machine (apache2, php, mysql). When I want to upload files to my live server (nginx, mysql, php5-fpm), I first backup my www folder, extract the databases, scp everything to my server (which is tedious, because it's protected with opiekey), log myself in, copy the files from my home directory on the server to my www directory and if I'm lucky and the file permissions and everything else works out, I can view the changes online. If I'm unlucky I'll have to research what went wrong.
Today, I changed only one file, and had to go through the entire process just for this file. You can imagine how annoying that is. Is there a faster way to do this? A way to automate it all? Maybe something like "commit" in SVN and off you fly?
How do you guys handle these types of things?
PS: I'm very very new to all this, so bear with me! For example I'm always copying files into my home directory on the server, because scp cannot seem to copy them directly into the /var/www folder?!
There are many utilities which will do that for you. If you know python, try fabric. If you know ruby, you may prefer capistrano. They allow you to script both local and remote operations.
If you have a farm of servers to take care of, those two might not work at the scale you want. For over 10 servers, have a look at chef or puppet to manage your servers completely.
Whether you deploy from local checkout, packaged source (my preferred solution), remote repository, or something entirely different is up to you. Whatever works for you is ok. Just make sure your deployments are reproducible (that is you can always say "5 minutes ago it wasn't broken, I want to have what now what I had 5 minutes ago"). Whatever way of versioning you use is better than no versioning (tagged releases are probably the most comfortable).
I think the "SVN" approach is very close to what you really want. You make a cron job that will run "svn update" every few minutes (or hg pull -u if using mercurial, similar with git). Another option is to use dropbox (we use it for our web servers sometimes) - this one is very easy to setyp and share with non-developers (like UI designers)...
rsync will send only the changes between your local machine and the remote machine. It would be an alternative to scp. You can look into how to set it up to do what you need.
You can't copy to /var/www because the credentials you're using to log in for the copy session doesn't have access to write on /var/www. Assuming you have root access, change the group (chown) on /var/www (or better yet, a sub directory) to your group and change the permissions to allow your group write access (chmod g+w).
rsync is fairly lightweight, so it should be simple to get going.

Automated deployment of files to multiple Macs

We have a set of Mac machines (mostly PPC) that are used for running Java applications for experiments. The applications consist of folders with a bunch of jar files, some documentation, and some shell scripts.
I'd like to be able to push out new version of our experiments to a directory on one Linux server, and then instruct the Macs to update their versions, or retrieve an entire new experiment if they don't yet have it.
../deployment/
../deployment/experiment1/
../deployment/experiment2/
and so on
I'd like to come up with a way to automate the update process. The Macs are not always on, and they have their IP addresses assigned by DHCP, so the server (which has a domain name) can't contact them directly. I imagine that I would need some sort of daemon running full-time on the Macs, pinging the server every minute or so, to find out whether some "experiments have been updated" announcement has been set.
Can anyone think of an efficient way to manage this? Solutions can involve either existing Mac applications, or shell scripts that I can write.
You might have some success with a simple Subversion setup; if you have the dev tools on your farm of Macs, then they'll already have Subversion installed.
Your script is as simple as running svn up on the deployment directory as often as you want and checking your changes in to the Subversion server from your machine. You can do this without any special setup on the server.
If you don't care about history and a version control system seems too "heavy", the traditional Unix tool for this is called rsync, and there's lots of information on its website.
Perhaps you're looking for a solution that doesn't involve any polling; in that case, maybe you could have a process that runs on each Mac and registers a local network Bonjour service; DNS-SD libraries are probably available for your language of choice, and it's a pretty simple matter to get a list of active machines in this case. I wrote this script in Ruby to find local machines running SSH:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'dnssd'
handle = DNSSD.browse('_ssh._tcp') do |reply|
puts "#{reply.name}.#{reply.domain}"
end
sleep 1
handle.stop
You can use AppleScript remotely if you turn on Remote Events on the client machines. As an example, you can control programs like iTunes remotely.
I'd suggest that you put an update script on your remote machines (AppleScript or otherwise) and then use remote AppleScript to trigger running your update script as needed.
If you update often then Jim Puls idea is a great one. If you'd rather have direct control over when the machines start looking for an update then remote AppleScript is the simplest solution I can think of.

Resources