Seeking a Decentralized Solution for my small business team

[Justin.Reinhart]

Hi.  I could really use a recommendation for how to setup Plastic SCM databases to be as decentralized as possible given my limited resources.

 

The following is often true:

- 2 team members

- Both team members use laptops and work from separate coffee shops on opposite sides of the country. Implications being that both laptops spend a lot of time being disconnected from the internet and ideally users should be able to "commit" changes without being online.

- We own a "shared hosting" package from Bluehost that does not offer SSH or port 8088 without paying more $$$. (And honestly they aren't great. Not sure I would want to give them more money.)

- However, bluehost does offer remote MySQL !  So we have that.

 

Network diagram:

Laptop A <---SLOW WAN---> pure MySQL server <----SLOW WAN---> Laptop B

 

Questions:

- Is it possible to make this work? Anything clever that can be done like each laptop running a server (or 2) and replicating to a remote MySQL database?

- If using remote MySQL impossible, what would you recommend as far as cloud hosting? For example, I read one article on Plastic SCM vs Amazon EC2 and it sounds promising, but it will cost money eventually. I'll go this route if I have to.

 

P.S.

If I could state this in another way: I've read a lot of the Plastic SCM documentation and everything is described as easy, but it is implied that the machine running the server is also running the database, or it is on the same LAN. I haven't seen anything explained about what to do when the server and the database are not on a LAN together and how to make that exchange either efficient (or invisible to the user running a Plastic client.)  Is a centralized server always a requirement, or can there simply be a centralized database?

 

P.P.S.  Although I have now asked for help with Amazon SC2 in another thread ( http://www.plasticscm.net/index.php?showtopic=2370 ), I am still very interested in using my existing web host and MySQL server if possible. 

[manu]

Hi!

 

I recommend you to use your hosted service for your central/integration server only.

Then the two developers will need to work replicated, sqlite will work just fine for them. That will allow them to check-in, create branches, merges... without connectivity with the central server. Once the connectivity is OK they can push the content created to the central server and pull the latest content created by the coworkers.

 

I use a RaspberryPi as my integration server, it's at home 24/7 available and accessible. Maybe you can do the same with a cheap computer somewhere, it's a matter of configuring the router with NAT to be accessible from the internet.

 

NOTE: Maybe you can give a try to bitbucket private repositories and use the Plastic GitSync feature to push/pull content.

[Justin.Reinhart]

I thought I replied to this thread but it must have been eaten by a browser crash.

 

Thanks for the recommendations. For the moment I will be going with Amazon EC2 as it appears to be free for the scale that I require for the moment but I will be keeping your recommendations in mind for sure.

 

Also, based on your reply I think the answer to my question "Can a central MySQL databases exist on its own without a dedicated Plastic Server assigned to it?" is "Not possible."

[manu]

Hi!

 

we don't recommend to have the database and the server in different machines, although it's doable the performance will be awful.

 

Only in networks with great transfer rate is "recommended".

[jamesmoo2090]

I am in the same boat, me and my best friend are starting our own thing on the side and costs are something to consider for us, here is what we did

 

I have an old  (core2duo) mac mini with only windows installed (heresy!!! no osx!!) and plastic scm installed

I got a account here: http://freedns.afraid.org ,  this is a DNS forwarder service, i got a free subdomain and on the windows box i have set up a dns updater

I installed openvpn on the mac mini

on my router i port forward the openvpn port to my mac mini server

 

what we do then is we connect to openvpn and then we can hit the plastic scm server from anywhere as if it was on the local network

 

also you can do other things with this setup such as setup an internal mediawiki site to keep track of our deliverables and BLIs and such and is all secure

 

my only advice is that on your router you port forward port 80 to another location like google.com just to be safe