Thoughts from the abyss

My boss has always talked about using version control software for many years. Me being rather green at many IT things, hasn’t really had a great deal of exposure to it. Especially, since I’m not a coder. Programming really isn’t in my blood…I’m much better at other things. Anyways, last year he switched to a piece of software called Subversion, short name is SVN. We’ve been using it for over a year now at work, and I do use it for a few things of my own, but I never really took the time to understand what was going on. I new two commands, how to check out a revision and edit it, then commit the changes back to the server. That was it…
The past few weeks I’ve been playing around with it more and more learning how it works. I decided to do a clean installation at home and play around with it to get a much better understanding. It’s rather simple and easy to use, and I really understand how powerful it is to track changes in anything. It’s not just for folks programming and coding huge projects where thousands of lines of code have to managed. My main purpose and use of it at work is to keep track of Nagios configuration files, because my setup is rather large. It works wonders for disaster recovery as well. All you need to do is install the same software on a machine, and then checkout the working most current revision, and voila, you’re back up and running with Nagios.

Anyways, the entire point of my rambling: I whipped up a quick install guide for the complete SVN newbie, like myself. I hope I simplified it, because I never really had it explained to me in great detail, other than what I RTFM’d.