Yep thats right $80. Now just as an initial disclaimer this may not be for everyone. Probably more an option for the small startups want to save a few pennies or the single contractor.

So with that out of the way, cut up your credit cards and move into the world of source repositries. I started out finding a IBM Netfinity 5000 with 1gig of registered ram, two 30gig raid drives, twin pentium II processors, backup powersupply …..basically for those not interested its a old enterprise level server in a monsterous black box, and sounds like a 747 on take off. It was a good score through online auctions, and I dont think it would be to hard find something similar. If I were in a startup I would possibly be looking for a tape drive for it to, just for the backups.

Now this monster isnt that fast. A twin 400mhz would really struggle under most windows platforms but I didnt go that route. And I wanted to explain to you what path I did go down as I think it might be interesting. 

LINUX!!!

Ok to set the scene I am not an uber geek. I tried linux once back durning the redhat 8 days and found it so manual and annoying that I havent been back since. Recently I saw that a project called openSuse released Suse 10.0. I investigated and saw that the install proccess was suposed to be quite easy. So I downloaded the 6 cds and gave it a go. For some machines it might go greate but I had problems, which required reasearch to solve. I dont want to bash this (well maybe the black box at times) and manuall mount that, so I was looking at giving up.

 Enter the Network setup. I found under Suse 9.3 you could download a boot.iso burn it to a cd and install the OS over ftp on the net. I have a home dsl connection and this really didnt take long at all to do. I downloaded and burnt the iso to cd. started it up and selected the basic options, entered the ip of the ftp server that I wanted to install from and click "Accept". I then took my girlfriend out to see Dukes of hazzard at the movies. After coming home it was finished and all I had to do was set a last few options and it was done. All up and running on a nice looking desktop.

So I now had a server running Suse 9.3, which had a performance similar to a machine of 2.2mhz running windows xp.

Next comes the source control. Source control for those of you not currently using it is a way of having people in your team "check in" and "check out" files. while a files checked out others cant edit it but can contiue to use it. Once a user checks a file in, it gets added to the source database with a new version number. This means that if at some time you want to go back to and older version of the file you can. you can also compare versions or see who did what in the file. It also allows remote access to users. I choose to use Subversion, a free opensource option. Theres is a free tool which intergrates with windows explorer to allow all the functionality and probably one for mac too! 

Installing Subversion on the server. I just went into what in the Suse world is called Yast2. Its the add/remove programs of the linux world. I searched for Subversion and it came back (after searching on the ftp server) with a few options which I checked what I wanted and clicked accept. Done 2 mins later I had Subervsion running.

I could now jump on my laptop and start a project repository and start checking in and out files. 

 So a file server running Subversion with raid mirrored drives (for backup) and a fast fully functional ftp/web/file server for 80 bucks. Best of all I have stuck it in a cupboard with my home brew kit and it keeps the brew at a nice temperature )

Come back to this blog in a bit and Ill post some screenshots and Links for doing this sort of thing. I might even try to find an example of a suitable server on ebay. might be nice to have a how to for some of us even though it was really pretty easy.

Why do it? Well with the WEB 2.0 thing coming (ignoring the hype) alot of us are going to have to become a more professional developer/s who doing things like source control through the life of a project. Flex builder 2 is built on Eclipse which has intergration with subversion so it makes good sense if your getting into that area. Some one may even include omthing similar into thier G-Project pannel for the flash IDE (Grant S looking in your direction). So while you might be fine at the moment from my experiences at work you could be alot better if you did move to this sort of system.