Problem setting up authz on svnserve

[Rick Varney]

Hello,

I am a newbie to using authz, and am trying to set it up for the first time.  For reasons I don't understand, I can't seem to get it working.

I am using svnserve and fsfs, subversion 1.8.10 for both server and client for testing.

My svnserve.conf setup is:

anon-access = none

password-db = passwd

authz-db = authz

Initial contents of my authz file (just trying to get *any* authz setup to work at this point):

[/]

* = rw

With this setup, here is what my client says when I try to do an svn ls:

$ svn ls svn://my_repos

svn: E210002: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn://my_repos'

svn: E210002: Network connection closed unexpectedly                  

I have tried giving an absolute path to authz, checking it into the repository and giving a URL but the result is the same each time.  As soon as I uncomment the authz-db line in svnserve.conf any access to the repo results in the above error.  When I comment the authz-db line again, the problem goes away.

The permissions, ownership, and location of my authz file match those of my passwd file, and svnserve is accessing the passwd file ok.

Errors I see in my svnserve.log that *may* be related are:

28207 2016-02-03T18:31:50.113582Z xxx.xx.xx.xxx - - ERR - 0 210002 Network connection closed unexpectedly

28540 2016-02-03T18:50:55.871361Z xxx.xx.xx.xxx - - ERR - 0 104 Can't read from connection: Connection reset by peer

But these only occurred rarely, and not each time I tried to access the repo and got the above client error.

At this point I'm stuck.  Am I doing anything obviously wrong?

Any suggestions on how I can debug this?

Many thanks!

Rick Varney

 

[Daniel Shahaf]

Rick Varney wrote on Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 09:31:40 -0800:
> Errors I see in my svnserve.log that *may* be related are:
>
> 28207 2016-02-03T18:31:50.113582Z xxx.xx.xx.xxx - - ERR - 0 210002 Network
> connection closed unexpectedly
>
> 28540 2016-02-03T18:50:55.871361Z xxx.xx.xx.xxx - - ERR - 0 104 Can't read
> from connection: Connection reset by peer
>
> But these only occurred rarely, and not each time I tried to access the
> repo and got the above client error.
>

You can do 'svnserve --foreground -d --root=/path/to/repos
--listen-port=3691 --log-file=/dev/stdout' and test against that svnserve
instance to ensure the log messages are related to a particular client
action. (You can run multiple instances in parallel.)

> At this point I'm stuck. Am I doing anything obviously wrong?
>
> Any suggestions on how I can debug this?

If *both* sides see a "Network connection closed unexpectedly" error at
the same time, I would suspect a firewall or proxy or a network
misconfiguration. (That said, I don't see how enabling path-based authz
would affect the on-the-wire traffic, given that anon-access=none is set.)

Try 'svnauthz accessof' and check that your user is reported as "r" or "rw".

Try 'svn info svn://localhost' locally on the server: does it
fail in the same way as on the client?

Cheers,

Daniel

P.S. If you don't have /dev/stdout you can use --log-file=/dev/fd/1 or
--log-file=$(tty).

[Rick Varney]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 4:22 PM, Daniel Shahaf <d...@daniel.shahaf.name> wrote:
>
>
> You can do 'svnserve --foreground -d --root=/path/to/repos
> --listen-port=3691 --log-file=/dev/stdout' and test against that svnserve
> instance to ensure the log messages are related to a particular client
> action. (You can run multiple instances in parallel.)
>

Thank you! This proved to be good advice. I was unaware I could run
multiple svnserve processes in parallel.

When I started a second svnserve process, I discovered it worked
perfectly fine with my authz setup. Also,
I noticed that doing "svn log" was starting to produce a "Network
connection closed unexpectedly" error on the
client side, making me suspicious my main svnserve process was getting
flaky for whatever reason. I restarted
my main svnserve process and my problem went away.

I don't understand why my svnserve process starting behaving this way,
but the problem is resolved for now.
I was able to modify my authz file to achieve my current access goals.

Many thanks for helping me get unstuck!

Best regards,

Rick Varney