Question

My problem is quite simple

I’m behind agressive proxy, firewall and every known human way to make a developer’s life miserable and I cannot clone a repository from Google Code or any other sort of online repository for that matter.

Question, Is there an online tool that allows me at least cloning a mercurial repository without having to access using non http protocols?

Answer 1

I doubt you’ll be able to get around your network’s restrictions with just a tool on your university machine.

I asked a sysadmin friend about this, and together we came up a few ideas. These are all rather vague because there really isn’t enough information about the university network to give a clear-cut solution. However, they all require the help of another machine outside of the university network. Well, almost all of them.

Fork it

It may be possible to set up a repository and server on a computer outside that network that allows http for pulling, especially if you already know which projects you want to clone. You can setup a scheduled job to pull from the original repositories to keep the forks up to date.

• If the university network is only blocking port 443 communication rather than the https protocol itself and you can only setup the forking server for https, you can configure it for a port other than 443 such as 8080, and since this web server is special-purpose you could even make it port 80.

Tunnel around

SSH, Telnet, Remote Desktop. Some repositories allow connections in addition to https, such as ssh. Not many that I’ve seen, though. But if the university network is not blocking certain remote connection protocols, you may be able to use one of those to connect to a computer outside the network and clone/pull to that machine and then to yours at the university. Or at the very least, copy it once you’ve cloned it.

Air beats fire

AKA Sneakernet. Clone them to portable storage outside of the university and carry it with you. Then plug it into the university computer and clone from there. There is a noticeable lag time, mind you.

• Other storage variations probably exist as well, such as if the university gives you network storage space you can access outside of that network. You could zip the repository and upload it to that.

Machiavelli

Orchestrate events and manipulate people so that the sysadmin is replaced by a competent sysadmin who will lift the draconian, asinine measures that are currently in place. The other options are probably much easier. And safer.