[thelist] CVS server specs

[Steve Lewis]

Paul Bennett wrote:

> is what quality of machine we'll need to run CVS.

Qualifiers:
I have admin'd Sourcesafe.  I won't do it again.
I have admin'd CVS in a low-demand environment only.
I have never admin'd Subversion.

I have used CVS and Subversion quite a bit, I hated Sourcesafe when I 
tried to use it and gave up.  YMMV.

On to the answer:

Large, redundant, hard drives (RAID is your friend) are optimal.
Fast hard drives are a nice option if you can afford it.  I would 
recommend starting at 60GB capacity if you do nothing else with the machine.

This machine must get backed up regularly.  Obvious, but just do it.

You don't need a lot of ram, and you don't need a fast processor.  Hard 
drive access will be your bottleneck.  Spare resources should go into 
fast drives.

> 2. Do open source CVS solutions run only on *Nix boxes? Our pcs come

CVS
http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/

CVS is a unix program.  You can run it under Windows, but you will be 
running a port.  I prefer running it under *nix, YMMV.  If you don't 
know how to use a *nix OS, or are not familiar with admiring a *nix OS, 
the experience can be painful.  It's a valuable skill, but you may have 
to be prepared to do more learning to keep your productivity high enough 
(working off the clock to learn to admin *nix, probably).

Alternatives to CVS

Sourcesafe has a low market penetration because it isn't that good of a 
package.  The version database tends to get corrupted easily and is 
difficult to backup is the repository gets large.

Subversion is a great package, and easy to use with TortoiseSVN (a 
Windows shell-integrated application).  Subversion (abbreviated as svn) 
is the future of source management.  You probably don't need that much 
power for version control of a website, but consider it as an easier to 
admin and easier to use version control package.

Subversion
http://subversion.tigris.org/

Sourcesafe
it's a Microsoft product, you can look it up.

-- 
SteveL