issues with permissions and Virtualmin's svn plug-in

Submitted by christefano on Sat, 10/23/2010 - 17:24 Pro Licensee

On a plain Debian server with two virtual servers set up (a main site at example.com and a dev site set up as a subserver at dev.example.com), errors started appearing when attempting to commit files via svn. Here's an example of one of the errors:

Commit
C:\xampp\htdocs\dev\trunk\sites\all\themes\private\views-view--delivery.tpl.php
Commit failed (details follow):
access to
'/svn/private/!svn/wrk/985eefb5-85c4-5b49-ae5c-034660824bee/trunk/sites/all/themes/private/views-view--delivery.tpl.php'
forbidden
access to
'/svn/private/trunk/sites/all/themes/private/views-view--delivery.tpl.php' forbidden

Sensitive names have been replaced with "private".

After fiddling with permissions for a while and coming up empty, I ended up exporting the repo, deleting it from the server (which I had to do manually since the "Delete" button didn't do anything and no error was shown) and re-importing it. I was then able to commit files as expected.

This isn't the first time this has happened. In all cases, developers are trying to commit over https (e.g. https://username@dev.example.com/svn/private) and the intervention listed above has been the only way I know to fix it (other than deleting the entire virtual server and re-creating it, which isn't an option most of the time).

Status: 
Active

Comments

Submitted by Locutus on Sat, 10/23/2010 - 17:50

Since access to the repository is done via HTTPS, are any useful entries being recorded in Apache's access and error logs at the time of commit attempt? Those might tell more than the errors on client-side.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Sat, 10/23/2010 - 18:20

Does the "Fix Permissions" button help in this case?

Also, are any developers accessing the repo via some other method, like SSH?

Submitted by christefano on Wed, 11/10/2010 - 07:07 Pro Licensee

No, the "fix permissions" button didn't help. I'll update this issue when I see the issue occur again.

Submitted by nvs_12 on Tue, 05/03/2011 - 00:19

I think I have the same problem, in my case the superuser can access the repository but the email-ftp users can't, I was playing around and I find something strange, I found that if you delete the email-ftp user in the password file located at /home/VIRTUALSERVER/etc/svn.basic.passwd and then recreate it with the same password using the following command "htpasswd -mb /home/VIRTUALSERVER/etc/svn.basic.passwd USERNAME PASSWORD" it works perfectly, also works with -mdb, -msb, -sdb, -sb, -db and -msdb didnt work with -pb

I check and the password created by virtualmin is encripted, then I can asume that the problem isn't in the encription, It can be that the password isn't set correctly in the password file?