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February 17, 2005
Subverted Usability
At work a group of us have setup a Subversion server for use, a first run trial server for the company really. It runs off a Windows 2003 server using Apache 2 and has been fairly stable for us, al biet the development teams are rather small. It hosts two repositories, one for me and my team (of one) and the other for a team of about 8 people. It's worked out really well for us so far.
Recently I've been asked to provide restricted access to my repository, mainly to allow someone read and write privs to a specific branch but not to anywhere else. I know how you can do this in CVS, and I figured, well it can't be that different in subversion. Enter the challenge of subversion.
Having read and re-read the Subversion book chapter on providing access control, which seems simple enough. The challenge actually isn't setting up Subversion on UNIX, but rather for the bits to work correctly on Windows. There is an awful lot of quirky behavior that needs to be solved yet. Add in the challenge of using Windows domains, and you've given yourself a double headache to deal with.
For example, in the Apache access log, the user name is sent in as DOMAIN\\USERNAME but the error log shows it as DOMAIN\USERNAME.
Four hours after starting, I was able to successfully block everyone from accessing the server, each being told that PROPFIND could not authenticate. Then the error log is telling me that the requested path is not a URI. Having worked hard to correct that I finally was able to get past the authentication issues using an entry for EVERY type of Windows login combination possible (see example issue above). Next problem introduced was the Subversion system could not read the repository for some unknown reason.
My question is, has anyone ever actually gotten this to work?
Posted by Dan at February 17, 2005 01:03 AM