SVN LDAP and Active Directory

We just upgraded to the 1.5 series of SVN. Almost all of our "team" tools have some hook into Active Directory (AD) for authentication. For SVN this is done via the AD LDAP interface. It turns out that some of SVN's auth_ldap libraries have changed and now our repository sits dead in the water.

For those who don't know, SVN is really just a very elaborate Apache web application. Apache handles the network communications while SVN does the versioning stuff. That being the case the real problem exists with the instance of apache that comes with SVN 1.5.0. I believe the LDAP module libraries shipped with SVN are out of date.

I have considered switching to the mod_sspi for authentication. Others have got it to work. Has anyone else had luck with this?

The benefit (I suppose) of SSPI would be the seamless inferance of domain credentials. In short, the SVN client should use your windows logon credentials to authenticate against the server. This is how CVSNT works but I'm not sure it's that easy with SVN.

Oh well....more later.

A Project Dashboard

Lots of talk at work about implementing a project management suite. I'm not a big fan of any of the current offerings. So, I've been working on an Excel spreadsheet to track project velocity and health. What I'm attaching pretty much tells me everything I need to know about a project's health. The spreadsheet has 2 worksheets; Data, Dashboard.

The Data workbook holds all the raw data about each iteration. Only Columns A thru F should be filled in. The rest of the columns are calculated using those values. Also, I have hidden all the rows from below the last row to row 1400. I do this so these rows aren't calculated into the charts on the Dashboard worksheet. As I add rows I unhide it.

The Dashboard workbook has several charts that I find useful. The release progress chart is a sort of burn down chart. It not only includes burn down but also tracks points completed. I like this chart because it gives me a rough estimate of a project's halfway point. The estimation quality factor lets you track your estimates over time. The estimates are calculated automatically ((Pts Remaining +AVGChange) / Velocity) but can be filled in manually if need be.

For my next challenge I will move the dashboard to Google Docs.

Take a look at the dashboard. Discuss it below....I'll post changes as requested!

Download Here!