Firewalls and Accessing Source Repositories

Many companies such as the one I work for (Sun) have a firewall which presents problems with accessing source code repositories on the Internet. This documents the approach I use.

To elaborate further, it works because we have Direct Internet Access (DIA) now. What I do is use the public repository hostname in my trees, like: CVSROOT=:pserver:USER@cvs.netbeans.org:/cvs. I handle the three separate cases this way:

1. In the office on SWAN (Sun Intranet), it works because of DIA
2. Off SWAN, it works because it's the real hostname
3. VPN on SWAN, I change the /etc/hosts file so that it points to the internal proxy:

    10.4.105.76    cvs.netbeans.org #really: cvsnetbeansorg.sfbay.sun.com

Case #3 is needed because DIA does not currently work for VPN. When it does get implemented, then there will only be two cases.

EdwinGoei 2007-06-26