I had hoped the svn client I use, TortoiseSVN, could support Public Key Authentication for svn+ssh, just as what the svn linux client can do.

Today, I had a look at the documentation of TortoiseSVN and found out that it IS INDEED possible to configure TortoiseSVN to use Public Key Authentication. It was just my assumption, it has not implemented this support, prevented me from digging into it.

The key point is to understand this: TortoiseSVN makes use of putty behind the scenes (more specifically, it uses a derivate work of plink, a windows ssh command client). You can tell putty to login ssh with Public Key Authentication: just go to Connection -> SSH -> Auth, select the a private key file for the authentication. Under Connection -> Data, you may also fill in Auto-login username, so that you don’t need to specify the username every time you login.

If you do not already have a pair of your own private/public keys, then you may want to check out PuTTYgen and Using public keys for SSH authentication.

If you come from linux world, like me, and already have your own private/public keys, just import it with PuTTYgen and save the private key to a format putty recognize, then select this saved private key in the place mentioned before. You have to save the session under a name, such as dojo, in order to make it accessible to other ssh dependent applications, such as TortoiseSVN.

Don’t forget to add your public key to file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in your subversion server.

After that, you should be able to ssh to your remote server without input your password. Next step is to tell TortoiseSVN to make use this Public Key Authentication. You don’t need to explicitly teach TortoiseSVN to use putty for ssh connection. All you need to do is in the checkout dialog of TortoiseSVN, instead of the normal host of the svn repository server, you just specify the session name (in this case, it is dojo). So instead of checking out dojo from this address:

svn+ssh://liucougar@svn.dojotoolkit.org/var/src/dojo/trunk

just use this:

svn+ssh://dojo/var/src/dojo/trunk

That’s all. TortoiseSVN can make use all the information you saved in that session for ssh connection, and you don’t need to type in password any more. That’s neat.

(As how TortoiseSVN knows about session saved in putty, here is my guess: putty stores all information of sessions in windows register, so that’s can be accessed by TortoiseSVN.)

The next issue is I can not browse his file shares. When I access \\169.254.220.234 (his laptop’s IP), I get "can not access error". After turn off his windows firewall, I can connect now, but it keeps asking a username/password to login. However, the username he normally uses can not login. I am forced to create a new one in his computer and login with it.

Now, finally, the two computers are connected. Next is to install some codecs, real player and upgrade his media player. All went well.

After that, I tested some avi files to see whether they can be played, but no success: real player/media player just crashes, and in fact, even exploeror will crash if I browse that dir containing the avi files.

I tried my own latptop, to my surprise, it crashes as well! (I normally use linux, so did not notice this before).

Google tells me that, codes conflict may be the cause. I uninstalled all codes packages, and install the codec pack all in 1, it backs to normal, finally.

At last, I have to revert the firewall changes and remove the user I created in his laptop.