Questions[vcs](server)

We use git to track changes in /etc/ on our servers.

Administrators work as root when changing files in /etc/, and thus their commits have author

root <root@machinename>

This is not very satisfying since you cannot see which admin actually did the change.

What can we do to get the real admin names in the git log? I don't think that keeping a local clone of the repository is feasible since we often change interatively until something works, and a change-commit-push-seeError-repeat cycle would not help here.

I want to host an SVN server (or git or mercurial or whatever). I have two options:

1. Install it on a small box sitting in the office closet, only connected to the LAN.

2. Install it on a server at a data center in another state that has a publicly accessible IP address and currently hosts a public facing website.

My concern with #1 is the only way people can connect from outside the office is to VPN, but this is the ONLY point of VPN in my office right now... so it seems heavy duty. Also, if the office catches fire or someone decides to steal the box from the closet, well... the server is gone. Which means I will have to keep backups somewhere anyway...

My concern with #2 is that having the source code on a public facing server means that theoretically, someone can gain access to the server and steal the code. The fact that there is already a public facing service being run on it worries me even more since there could be an exploit for that software discovered.

How do most companies manage their source control servers and backups securely?

1. I have create a local directory, and made some sub-directories and file in it.
2. registered by project on code.google.com/hosting
3. install Mercurial and did hg init
4. copied the auto-generated password from Google, still don't know for what.

Now how do i upload files my local to the repository on Google. Tired googling a lot, almost all the information is available for SVN users.

Do i have to create a branch on mercurial first. I am sorry if it is too silly, but how do I create one, the site does say anything create or upload or add.

Can anyone please share, how he started/uploaded his project?

Right now my company is using a network share to communicate with the SVN repository. It's really slow so I'd like to switch to SVNSERVE.

The main reason my company chose to go the filesystem route was because it made it easy to secure using our existing active directory authentication system.

From what I've read it is possible to use SvnServe with active directory as long as you use the Sasl library. I was just wondering if anybody else out there is doing this and could give some pointers on configuration since it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere.

Thanks

Edits

We have svn on a fast server but it is unfortunately used for other corporate file shares and services.

I'm being told that HTTP protocol won't be faster than file:// with SMB. Does anybody have any documentation of this. I figured a true client server model would perform better. We have about 13 developers and a build server committing and updating from it all day.

What is the easiest VCS to use to track /etc with? What are the challenges in storing the etc directory in version control, best practices? Should I use a centralized or distributed VCS?