How do I configure m2eclipse ( maven plugin for eclipse ) to use a centralized maven repository that is also used in jenkins.
The default user settings in m2eclipse is something like "home/user/.m2" How can we do something like "ssh user@192.168.1.200:/var/lib/jenkins/.m2"?
A neat and easy way to do it is to use a repository manager. Sonatype's Nexus seems to be the most popular, but there are others (e.g. JFrog Artifactory and Apache Archiva). They run as HTTP servers, and you can change your Maven configuration (both locally and for Jenkins) to use it as a mirror for any Maven repository (e.g. the Central Maven repo), or use it to host your own repositories.
There is no need to do that. Your POM files list dependencies and they list repositories. Maven will then resolve your dependencies against all known repositories (the listed ones and the "build-in" ones, like Maven central).
Maven will do this in m2eclipse, when running a Maven build. Maven will also do that when running the build on Jenkins. So if both machines can connect to all the repositories listed in your POM files, both will retrieve the same artifacts and both will do the same builds.
You should really not try to share the local copy of the artifacts. That is as bad as if I and you try to share our Maven artifacts using a network share. Maven is designed to find and manage those artifacts and you are trying to do its job with this question.
