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Perforce On The Road, p4tunnel

March 18, 2007 - 4:20am | by R. Tyler Croy

The best means of accessing a Perforce repository is over an SSH tunnel, to access my home repository while I'm on the road I use a handy-dandy little script to do a few things:

  • Access Perforce
  • Access P4Web
  • Setup a SOCKS5 proxy

The proxy is more so I can have some semblance of security while on open wireless networks, the rest should be self explanatory.

Anyways, straight from /usr/local/bin, here's my p4tunnel script:

  1. #!/bin/sh
  2.  
  3. HOST="yourhost.com"
  4. PROXY_PORT="8081"
  5.  
  6. echo "===> Creating tunnel to ${HOST} with a SOCK5 proxy on port ${PROXY_PORT}" 
  7.  
  8. ssh ${HOST} -L 1666:localhost:1666 -L 8080:localhost:8080 -D ${PROXY_PORT} -C

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Comments

by Anonymous | March 19, 2007 - 10:41am

That's why I switched to ionForge Evolution

It's great that you can do these kinds of things with Perforce, but the number of hurdles you have to clear is a hassle. I gave up on Perforce and switched over to Evolution from ionForge.

With Evolution I just enabled encryption on the server, opened the port of my choice on my firewall, and I can access the server from anywhere just as if I was there at home. Don't you just love it when things are easy?

by R. Tyler Croy | March 19, 2007 - 11:46am

re: ionForge Evolution

A valid point, however I try to keep as little open as possible from my "corporate" network. Any little hurdles could easily be solved by VPN, but that is something I have not desire to setup as I am a big fan of SSH tunnels.

The "hurdles" with Perforce are taken in stride once you start administering it, branching things out and merging in and out of development branches. I don't use a SCM system for the means of connecting to it, but rather, the ease of using it for it's primary purpose.