@ astine:

Heh! Yeah, git is deceptively simple. Especially when you are used to github being the “everything and the kitchen sink” type service it is easy to think there is more to it than it is. But at the end of the day it was written by Linus and it conforms to the unix philosophy quite well – be good at one thing, and get the fuck out of the way of actual work.

@ Chris:

Yeah, I had the same experience when running SSH server on an old PC back in the day. It was getting hammered by intrusion attempts all the time. I currently don’t have a spare machine I could dedicate to serverdom but I think I will put the SSH port on 433 when I eventually set one up. :)

@ icebrain:

See, I have this thing about free proxies and vpn’s – my mind always assumes that all of them are gigantic honeypots designed to steal people’s passwords and encryption keys. :P

@ nazri:

When I started using git, I was a bit intimidated by the command line so I used GUI wrappers such as TortoiseGit. The GUI actually did make it more work to set up a repository. Then I ended up using it on linux with no GUI tools installed, and realized that the GUI wasn’t really making my life easier but rather obscuring some git features from me.

I read and I snickered :D heheh

What got me to git was “git init”. Realizing that that was the only incantation you need to to start your repository was quite an overwhelming experience for me, after years of using svn.

I don’t have much in terms of git-trick, but I do enjoy finding other people’s git scripts – porcelains that they themselves wrote – that make git just a little more fun to use.

Here’s one that I wrote myself, and use everyday: git-number

I was in a similar situation not long ago (on a public Wifi), so I googled a bit and found a free VPN service called proxpn that routes everything through port 443. It only has Windows and Mac clients, but since it’s based on OpenVPN, it was just a matter of installing it with Wine and then finding the configuration file on its path, which can be fed directly to Debian’s openvpn command.

Of course, running everything through a VPN just for Github doesn’t make much sense ;)

I’ve got my Emacs config checked into Git, which I sometimes tweak at work. So I need to push to GitHub from work, too. I’ve used https pushing as well as tunneling through an ssh connection to home over port 443. I prefer the ssh method because I can use an ssh key, which plays better with Magit.

Running my home ssh server on 443 has the nice advantage that I’ve never seen anyone attack it, because no one’s looking for ssh on that port. When it was on the original 22, I would see several new attackers every day, which always had be worrying.

The web filter at my office used to be pretty strict (no sourceforge wtf?) and I had to tunnel around it through a slicehost vps. They didn’t block port 22 so I didn’t have to go over port 80 or anything like that.

Actually, I had a similar “Duh!” moment not long ago with git when I realized that running git over ssh didn’t require setting up any git-daemon or gitorious or anything. All I needed was for the remote repository to be on a machine with sshd running and to provide the correct url. So simple and I’d been doing it wrong for at least a year and a half.