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?

Answer 1

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".

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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).