Flutterby™! : SVN corruption 2007-05-31 04:02:13.510542+00

SVN corruption

2007-05-31 04:02:13.510542+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Holy expletive followed by multiple loud expletives. We just got a corrupted SVN repository. There is precedence:

Except that we're running BerkeleyDB, not FSFS. Gulp. Now it was extremely strange that I was getting different failures on multiple runs of svnadmin verify ... and svnadmin dump ..., so it's also quite possible that we're up against some wackiness on OS/X. Which also kicks me into brown trousers mode (but, alas, wouldn't surprise me too much).

Some notes on recovering an SVN repository:

http://osdir.com/ml/mail.eyebrowse.user/2004-05/msg00017.html

And, note to the wise: svnadmin hotcopy ... seems like a great way to make backups, except... it appears that repositories are path dependent, and they're definitely processor byte order dependent. Some strategy involving svnadmin dump ... would be a much better idea.

This is an argument for using svn+ssh rather than https...

Sorry to hear about this -- I've really never had anything but bad luck with the BDB backend. It just randomly up and craps out, oftentimes for seemingly no reason at all -- and then all you can do is run the BDB recovery program and hope...

Of course you find this and scare the pants off me right when we are trying to implement Subversion here. Sigh. I wish I could convince everyone to just use RCS ....

I'm not yet convinced that it isn't either failing hardware or Mac OS X funkiness. When the old Mac hand in this process asked "have you tried rebooting?" I just about lost it, when that changed the results of what I was getting (not fixed it, but all of a sudden svn verify ... started giving consistent results again), I was speechless.

If my OS doesn't consistently give me the same bytes every time I try to read a file... well...

So the machine degraded further today and we're into full-on forensics mode. Faith in Subversion restored. Backups: good. Hot mirrors: better. I'll be building some of the latter into the next few days.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-05-31 22:14:44.292967+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Last time I went looking for source control systems we needed something that'd deal with less capable operating systems like Windows, and the one I found that had capabilities like that couldn't deal with a filesystem that didn't have symlinks. Now we're pretty committed to SVN on the project that this crashed server is about, but I've been wanting to experiment with something for my other projects. That looks like the next step.