SVN in remote location, big checkouts sometimes fail through Jenkins

Question

I a running Jenkins on a local machine but our SVN repository is located elsewhere. The network traffic goes through a VPN tunnel. Sometimes when Jenkins has to do a full-checkout, it may take up to an hour (this is normal). However very often, the build fails due to error in the checkout and Jenkins receives this error message:

org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E210004: Malformed network data

I have yet to receive the error when I check out on my local machine in the same network, so I would suspect that it has got something to do with Jenkins. I am using Jenkins v. 1.467, Jenkins Subversion Workspace v. 1.4, and SVN server v. 1.6.11

Answer 1

I am encountering the same problem, under redhat.

• Jenkins can't perform a svn switch although a full checkout does work.
• Svn under command line fully works as expected.

I suspect SVNKit to be the cause, but hard to find resources on this bug so I'll add my two cents on the problem.

We have the both things in common:

1. Network traffic goes through a VPN tunnel.
2. SVN does works but Jenkins does not.

As it can often happen in VPN tunnels, the problem may comes from the Maximum Segment Size (MMS), causing SVN commands never reach host leading to a Malformed network data Exception.

Try to lower the MTU of your interface discussing with the svn server to 600 for instance and see what happen. To do so, type in the following command:

ip link set dev eth0 mtu 600

Restart the network and trigger a svn switch with Jenkins.