I have to log into Linux servers from different customers and use there essential tools like SVN, etc. Most of the times I get no root access, and usually the administrator is on holidays 🙂 so I have to get the way to use this tools there. Sometimes this is very straightforward process, just compile the code. But in some of the cases, I have to get before a lot of different tools compiled before it, so I can easily spend two hours just to get SVN compiled.
I wonder what do you think is the best workaround or solution for this. I thought about the following:
There is somekind of tool that can convert a RPM (or DEB or similar) package to a static binary with all necessary libraries, etc, included there. Even if I get a very big file.
If I need to use program “X”, I could create a script like call_X.sh that when invoked, uses SSH to send the input to the program “X” installed in some remote machine, do there the necessary operations, and get the resulting files back.
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Answer
Rootless GoboLinux and Gentoo Prefix are both systems in which packages can be installed to a local directory without root permissions.
It’s also possible to extract the contents of a .deb (dpkg -x) or .rpm (rpm2cpio | cpio -i), and you may be able to use the results with little or no modifications, depending on how they were built. klik actually automatically does this for some Debian packages.