In work I’ve discovered a number of problems when accessing open source code repositories that are using SVN or GIT. Attempts to access a number of repositories just fails with a connection failed message.
After some time of getting these, and finding some repositories working, I noticed that the common attribute for those repo’s that were accessible, was that they were via http. Now that might be fine, but there is a reason for the repositories to have their own protocols, in that they are tuned to be more efficient at transferring the necessary information. In addition not all sites make the repositories available over http in additional to the native format.
Obviously the core problem here is with the corporate firewall blocking outbound requests over certain ports. Perfectly understandable, but sometimes just a little unhelpful when you need to be able to access various upstream repositories when working with open source to check for bug fixes in the code.
After several problems in accessing some git repos that didn’t have http equivalents I did some searching and found the following website http://www.emilsit.net/blog/archives/how-to-use-the-git-protocol-through-a-http-connect-proxy/ which described how you could use socat to create a tunnel that allowed access to git repositories without having to find one that permitted access over http.
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