Svn repository stopped working with svn+ssh (but works locally on the server)

Question

I had an svn repository that I used to checkout with the svn+ssh protocol. It has some EXTERNALS in it that refer to itself with the svn+ssh URL.

I was off this project for a while until today. When I try to access the svn+ssh url (that used to work some months ago) I get the message svn: No repository found in 'svn+ssh://my-correct.hostname.com/the/right/path/to/the/repository. I double checked, and both the path and the hostname are correct.

I tried to check it out on the machine hosting the repo using a file:// URL, and it succeeded until it had to checkout the EXTERNALS, where it failed with the No repository message. I used the same user locally and remotely.

Where should I look for logs/debug information to solve this issue?

Voltaism

Answer 1

I found my way through. I'm writing it here for future reference.

EDIT: It turns out a fellow colleague modified that file without notifying. Yet finding the cause of the problem was more difficult than ideal.

Long story short: even if I used the url svn+ssh://my-correct.hostname.com/the/right/path/to/the/repository the real path looked up on the server was /var/svn/the/right/path/to/the/repository. A wrong path indeed. But I think that the steps I did to find this might be useful to others, so I'll report them here.

First I moved (on the server) /usr/bin/svnserve to /usr/bin/svnserve.orig and put my own svnserve with these contents:

#!/bin/bash
strace -o /tmp/svntrace /usr/bin/svnserve.orig $@ | tee /tmp/svnserve-out

Then I run my checkout again, and after that /tmp/svntrace on the server had in its tail all the info I needed to troubleshoot the problem.

It seems that in the file /var/svn/svnwrapper.sh a new root for svn was set with the -r option. After removing that all worked like a charm.

I still can't understand what happened (it used to work in the past and I'm almost sure I didn't change anything).

Voltaism

Answer 2

Thanks for introducing me to strace. I used strace to debug why the command:

svn+ssh://HOSTNAME/path/to/svn/directory

will not recognize this line in ~/.ssh/config:

Host HOSTNAME

To use strace, in the [tunnels] section of ~/.subversion/config. I changed this:

ssh = ssh -o ControlMaster=no

to this:

ssh = strace -o tmp ssh -o ControlMaster=no

Then I ran this command:

svn list svn+ssh://HOSTNAME/path/to/svn/directory

Looking at the output of strace that went into file "tmp" I could see that "HOSTNAME" was passed to the ssh command as "hostname". The quick fix was to change this line in ~/.ssh/config:

Host HOSTNAME

to this:

Host HOSTNAME hostname

Which causes the host specific settings to be applied whether the name of the host is passed to ssh as "HOSTNAME" or "hostname".

Loferski

Thanks for guide to using strace - from this I found the reason svn+ssh failed for me was that I needed to set stricter permissions on my private key file as described here – Classmate

Answer 3

I don't know where you can find the logs but I think you could remove/change the the externals property in that directory with this command:

svn propedit svn:externals path/to/dir

see: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s03.html

Wormy

Answer 4

strace helped isolate the issue. My repository was located at /var/svn/repos but the trace showed that it failed to find /repos/format. I added a symbolic link at /repos pointing to /var/svn/repos and it started working again.

Bigotry