SVN "PROPFIND request failed on..."

Question

I was checking out a repository (say foo) from SVN while doing some other commits / updates. My server died and I was left with an incomplete checkout. Fine. The problem is when I go back to access the foo repository, but I am unable to. It just hangs forever.

So, I went to http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#bdb-recovery and ran svnadmin recover. I received an error, so I ended up having to use db_recover and the command said it completed successfully.

Now when I try to access the repository, I am getting:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/foo'
svn: PROPFIND of '/foo': 500 Internal Server Error (https://svn.foobar.com)

Also, if I navigate to https://svn.foobar.com/foo I see:

<D:error>
<C:error/>
<m:human-readable errcode="160029">
Could not open the requested SVN filesystem
</m:human-readable>
</D:error>

Anyone have any thoughts?

Note: All other repositories work. It is just this one.

Answer 1

Did you run 'svnadmin recover' as the user usually using the repository (e.g. apache account)?

If not the reason could be that some files are now owned by the user running 'svnadmin recover' leaving the apache account without rights to change the repository files.

Answer 2

If you are the one setting up the SVN server over HTTP(S) this could just be the Apache server saying that it doesn't understand PROPFIND.

In my case this happened when I setup a 'Location' in the Apache HTTPD config w/o specifying it to be the SVN WebDAV implementation (the SVN mod is an extension on WebDAV):

  <Location /svn>
       SVNParentPath /data/scm/repositories/
       SVNPathAuthz off
       AuthType Basic
       AuthName "xxxxx"
       AuthBasicProvider ldap
       AuthLDAPURL ldap://xxx.yy:389/DC=aaaa,DC=bbbb?sAMAccountName?sub
       Require valid-user
   </Location>

Instead of this:

 <Location /svn>
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath /data/scm/repositories/
   SVNPathAuthz off
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "xxxxx"
   AuthBasicProvider ldap
   AuthLDAPURL ldap://xxx.yy:389/DC=aaaa,DC=bbbb?sAMAccountName?sub
   Require valid-user
 </Location>

Seems a logical mistake after I found it, but took me quite some time to find the mistake...

Answer 3

I got this propfind error because the power went out and I had forgotten to restart the svnserve and Apache instances =)

Answer 4

Sometimes different Java versions installed could cause the Eclipse SVN plugin (my case Subversive 1.7) to not work.

I used JVM 1.6, but my environment path pointed to a newer version (due to installing Oracle Java web start or something).

So I repathed to the old Java 1.6 version, and it worked.