Hmm...

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Konrad Hinsen <[email protected]>
wrote:

> The one that bothers me most in my own work is that I use a cluster to
> work on my big files, and my cluster happens to have the most extreme
> firewall imaginable: no Internet access at all. I can connect to the
> machine via ssh, and that's it: no other protocol, and no outgoing
> connections. For me, a "big file" version control system must thus allow
> repository synchronization via ssh (e.g. using scp).


If you can clone git repos onto the restricted server, you can then use git
annex to push files to the remote from anywhere that has ssh access. If you
have access within your cluster, this could even be a very useful way to
keep track of what files are where (git annex list). But this simple
premise underscores the difficulty with git annex, it is written for people
who are good with git, which is almost no-one. I knew I could do this, and
this is how complicated it was:

## On server

Create a git-annex directory, do a git init (and git annex init - not sure
if this is necessary), then checkout -b a dummy branch (to allow pushing).

## On laptop

Similarly add a git / git annex repo. Create a dummy file, git annex add
it. Add the server as a remote. Do some combination of git push and git
annex sync. Now you have a symlink to your file on the server, but not the
content. You can use git `annex copy filename --to server`, but happily, to
illustrate my point, git-annex (on my laptop) decided git-annex wasn't
installed on the server. So, I had to edit .git/config to remove the
annex-ignore line. After deleting that, I was able to git annex copy to the
server.

I am intentionally not providing the steps I used, as I am not encouraging
anyone to do this that isn't better than me at git. In which case, the
above should be more than enough.

## Epilogue, on server (did you forget)?

git checkout master

Maybe git annex assistant makes this easier, but I've never managed to use
it in a way that helped with anything.

I still like git annex better than anything else I tried. But then again, I
use Vi.
-- 
Dav Clark
Data Scientist
Berkeley D-Lab + BIDS
bead.glass
510-664-7000
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