There are a lot of blogs and articles out there about SVN and NFS. You can search google and easily find a lot of information about them. But I never found anybody that felt like they found a definitive answer.

In my case I kept getting an error about not being able to find and available lock, the error looks something like svn: Can't get exclusive lock on file '/repo/db/write-lock': No locks available It turns out it is actually pretty easy to fix. And for those that don’t want to read further, all you have to do is add the nolock option to your nfs mount. My fstab entry now looks like this192.168.1.154:/volume1/svn /media/svn nfs rw,nfsvers=3,nolock 0 0. That’s all I use, and now my svn is working over nfs, safely I might add.

For those looking for a bit more explanation (which is what I couldn’t find). SVN dev’s prefer you not to use the Berkeley DB over NFS. So make sure you are running a new enough SVN so it uses the FSFS backend not the BDB. The next, it is my understanding that SVN uses file locks to protect the files during checkout and checkin, to prevent them from being over written. NFS uses NLM locking and it is used so that all clients of that nfs export no about the file lock. Apparently subversion is compatible with this locking mechanism. Adding the nolock option to the mount point as the client uses a more basic locking mechanism that only provides protection only form programs running on that machine.

What does all this mean, it means I am able to mount my svn share on a nfs export, but only that one machine can really access this export to guarantee consistency in our repository. You do lose some of the benefits of it being over an NFS share, you couldn’t do any type of load balancing over multiple SVN frontend servers, but it does allow our NAS to hold our repository and puts me one step closer to consolidating our storage.

While I didn’t provide a new answer, I am providing the reasoning behind the answer as I can see it. Something I couldn’t find out there on the Internet.

I’m really torn about what to use for my blogging software. I’ve gone through many different ones, and ended up on b2evo. I like, I really do, but it is falling behind times, themes are not being developed for it, and I don’t really have the time to write the things I want for it.

At the time I picked b2evo, there were some fundamental things I didn’t like with WordPress. But those things have changed, and I am really thinking about moving to it. Which sucks, but I’ve started to use my blog, and I have a good handful of blog post I really don’t want to use. There are some conversion utilities out there, but I’ve read mixed things about it. I don’t care too much about the links, I just want the thing to work.

So no point really to do this post, just thinking out loud.

Lately I’ve been reading through Jeff Atwood’s blog and the blog he maintains with Joel Spolsky over at StackOverflow. I am not focusing on the programing related posts as much as I am about over management of not only people but information in general. Recently Jeff Atwood wrote a blog post about how email is basically dead to him. Sure he still uses it, but it describes where e-mail fails and how some of the more social forms of communications are a lot more efficient.

Reading through this, I think most people can relate. Trying to keep that Inbox clean is a time intensive task. I find myself doing just what Jeff describes, adding more content and detail then needs to be in the e-mails, and I get a lot of e-mails like that also. Even my family now is using e-mails to communicate news in the family, pictures and updates on their kids. While it is nice to have this information, being consumed with it is overwhelming. Using micro-blogging services is a why to help cut back on some of the e-mail chatter, while using IM’s is another way to handle those quick conversations. Jeff also suggest using a blog to answer questions in e-mails. Why answer 20 e-mails separately when one blog post can handle them all. A lot of people use e-mail, thinking it is private and safe. I’m sorry to tell you, it isn’t. Go search on Microsoft e-mail and lawsuit, and you will find out what is said in e-mails isn’t private. So why treat it that why?

I find myself wanting to get away from e-mails, and that form of communication, but I also don’t have to time to follow blogs all day. We live in a very information driven society. The internet has made us more involved with everyone. We have to be in the know. Most of us enjoy sharing our information. But we, as humans, only have so much capacity. Time, resources, memory; where does everything end. It is a on-going information share.

I think things like IM, blogs, migro-blogging and wiki’s are all in our future and really have a chance of replacing e-mail. But as long as there are people who have trouble moving to new technology, old technology will stay around, almost dragging us down as we the rest of us try to move on.