And now, for something a little different! It’s a pretty dreary and cloudy day here in Toronto but the morning’s off to a great start seeing as I actually found (by coincidence, nonetheless!) a poem that I’ve been looking for quite a while. It’s a beautiful short piece by Jeffrey McDaniel about what life would be like if talk is not cheap (source):

The Quiet World
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, I know
she’s used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
– Jeffrey McDaniel

Problem

I wrote a Ruby app on my laptop. The staging server is in a closed network with no access to the outside or Internet at all. I do have VPN access to the staging server so I can scp over my code, but installing gem dependencies would be far too painful.

Solution

Our old painful methodology was to download each gem as a gemfile separately and scp them over through the network and then install the gems from the files. It was just too painful, especially for projects with large number of gem dependencies.

So I thought, if the staging server cannot access the normal rubygems repository, why not make our own gem repository right inside the closed network?

1. Open a VPN connection on the laptop to the staging network
2. On the laptop, note then tunnel IP address (usually tun0)
3. On the laptop, run

   gem server

   This will run a local gem server right on your laptop which will serve local copies of your gems

4. On the staging server, run

   gem install [gem name] --remote --source "[laptop_ip]:8808"

5. (optional) you might need to mess some firewall and iptables to make sure that other servers can connect to your laptop