More TFS woes

Disclaimer: TFS is not my VCS of choice. I use it because that is what the client site where I'm working uses.

I'd heard about it before but only just ran into it myself today. I'm referring to the TFS character limit which I've come to learn is actually a Windows character limit that is a holdover from older APIs. NTFS actually supports filenames in excess of 32000 characters yet windows APIs, and thus any tool built on top of those APIs, still has a limit of 260 characters. Apparently Microsoft doesn't intend to fix it (or didn't in 2011). If that's not technical debt then I don't know what is.

They have started addressing it to some degree in TFS 2012 with support for up to 400 character paths but on the server only.

Setting up TortoiseGit to work with SSH on a different port (not port 22)

So recently we've had some headaches giving users on Windows machines access to our git repository (me being one of them but not the first). In searching for a solution to this problem I found several people with the same issue but having to use various workarounds or actually change their ssh port back to 22. All of the workarounds were out of the question for me but I knew there had to be a way to do it. Basically I just followed some of the better posts about using Git on Windows out there with a couple minor changes.

Here are links to a few of the posts I looked at while trying to figure this out:

http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jason_meridth/archive/2009/06/01/git-for-windows-developers-git-series-part-1.aspx

http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/tour.html

http://kylecordes.com/2008/04/30/git-windows-go/

The important pieces to make sure you get it working are these:

1. Be sure you choose the OpenSSH option when installing msysgit
2. Be sure you choose the OpenSSH option when installing TortoiseGit
3. create a .ssh/config file and enter something like the following

Host name_of_host_where_your_git_repo_is

User git

Hostname name_of_host_where_your_git_repo_is

Port port_number

PreferredAuthentications publickey

IdentityFile "/path/to/your/openssh/private/key"

And you should be good to go. I actually set up msysgit and my ssh config file first, then I made sure that I could connect and then I installed TortoiseGit.

Tips:

1. If you created your private key using puttygen then you'll need to export it (using puttygen) as an OpenSSH key.
2. While testing your connection you can use ssh -v git@github.com (or @ your own host even) to see what ssh is doing and to make sure it is finding your key correctly.
3. If your openssh key is located at C:\users\myuser\keys\key.ssh then the path to your IdentityFile should be like this: /c/users/myuser/keys/key.ssh