Hi Daniel

If you look at one of your existing working copies (run for example svn
> info from the command line), what is the highest revision number you have
> there?
>
Have the same revision # on the client too


william@william-ryzen:~/Documents/application$ svn info
Path: .
Working Copy Root Path: /home/william/Documents/application
URL: https://carbon.example.com/svn/application
Relative URL: ^/
Repository Root: https://carbon.example.com/svn/application
Repository UUID: 02a4eb3e-e1fa-4ead-9f6a-c97b0409a8a7
Revision: 269999
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: nathan
Last Changed Rev: 269999
Last Changed Date: 2026-05-11 15:54:29 -0400 (Mon, 11 May 2026)

william@william-ryzen:~/Documents/application$


>
> I have a feeling that something has caused the 270 directory to disappear,
> thus your repository is now in an inconsistent state. I'm not sure if you
> can recover except restoring a backup. If you can run svnadmin dump and
> then svnadmin load to a new repository, you can probably get a working
> repository with the first 269999 revisions, but you of course loose
> everything later than that.
>

Possibly, I am open to that being the case.  Is there a way to be confident
this is what happened?

- I have two systems - the backup which was using svnsync is also in the
same state.  I suspect having a replica doesn't change much as cron was
scheduled to run every 5 minutes, so if the directory 270 was created and
destroyed within 5 minutes, the replica wouldn't have picked the change
[root@boron ~]# cat /usr/local/bin/svnsync.sh
/usr/bin/svnsync  sync file:///var/repos/svn/projects
- The last svndump restore  leaves the repo in the same state.  Wouldn't
the repo dump have flagged that something is off?  Wouldn't the restore the
restore fail when it try to replay the entry 270080 that SVN seems to
assume exit?
-  The svnadmin verify pass all the commits up to 269999

What else can we do to figure out where the corruption is?

>
> To answer the question about maximum revision number: The ASF main
> repository (https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf) is currently at revision
> 1934607, so over 7 times your repository. I'm not sure about size but I
> believe it is quite huge.
>
>
Ok, so there exit repo bigger than this then, thanks.


Regards,
William

> Kind regards,
> Daniel
>
>
>
> Den mån 25 maj 2026 kl 19:13 skrev William Muriithi <
> [email protected]>:
>
>> Hi guys and girls
>>
>>
>> Something I missed to mention. Originally, the file contents looked like
>> this:-
>>
>> [root@repos ~]# cat /var/repos/svn/projects/db/current
>> 269999
>> [root@repos ~]# cat /var/repos/svn/projects/db/txn-current
>> 5sbz
>>
>> These files seem to be important on how SVN makes the decision of which
>> directory to dump/look for a file.   So I looked around  and google result
>> suggested that the last file may be incorrect.
>>
>> So I changed it to:-
>>
>> [root@repos ~]# cat /var/repos/svn/projects/db/txn-current
>> 5r3j
>>
>> MOVE forward:
>> I then created the files strace point as SVN access points.  All below
>> commands were executed as user apache
>>
>> mkdir /var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270
>> cd /var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270
>> touch 270000 270016 270080 270336
>> svnadmin recover /var/repos/svn/projects/
>>
>> When I tried committing a new, I got a new error:-
>>
>> svnadmin: E160004: Revision 270336 has a revs file but no revprops file
>>
>> MOVE backward:
>> [root@repos ~]# cat /var/repos/svn/projects/db/current
>> 269999
>> [root@repos ~]# cat /var/repos/svn/projects/db/txn-current
>> 5r3j
>>
>> svnadmin recover /var/repos/svn/projects/ (As apache user) - It run
>> successfully.
>>
>> Then we went back to SVN client and got the old error
>>
>> Basically, we can't seem to move it back or forward.
>>
>> Regards,
>> William
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 25 May 2026 at 12:24, William Muriithi <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi guys,
>>>
>>> [root@repos ~]# rpm -qa | grep subversion
>>> subversion-libs-1.14.5-3.el10.x86_64_v2
>>> subversion-1.14.5-3.el10.x86_64_v2
>>> subversion-tools-1.14.5-3.el10.x86_64_v2
>>> [root@repos ~]#
>>> [root@repos ~]#
>>> [root@repos ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
>>> AlmaLinux release 10.1 (Heliotrope Lion)
>>> [root@repos ~]#
>>> [root@repos ~]# rpm -qa | grep svn
>>> mod_dav_svn-1.14.5-3.el10.x86_64_v2
>>>
>>>
>>> I think I have hit a bug.  We have a relatively large SVN repository -
>>> About 2TB uncompressed.  2 weeks ago, someone noticed that we can't commit
>>> any more.  When we looked at it, it looked like a permission issue.
>>>
>>> This is the error we are getting from the SVN client.
>>>
>>> svn: E000001: Commit failed (details follow):
>>> svn: E000001: Can't set permissions on
>>> '/var/repos/svn/application/db/revs/270'
>>> william@william-ryzen:~/Documents/application$
>>> [email protected]
>>>
>>> So we first attempted to "FIX" permissions.  Didn't work.  Then, when
>>> reading, I noticed opening up the permission is not a good idea as I can
>>> see from strace that svn does try to narrow down the file permissions.  So
>>> we decided to restore a fresh to remove all the chmod we had done to the
>>> files and directory.
>>>
>>> This time, when restoring, we created the repo using an apache account.
>>> We also loaded the dump file using the svn account.  This removed all
>>> possibility this is a file permission issue.  The repo was restored
>>> successfully, BUT the problem remained.
>>>
>>> We looked at the file limit too and to make sure that isn't causing any
>>> issues, we changed it to unlimited for the apache user.  The problem
>>> remained.
>>>
>>> It's at this point we attempted to use strace to see what svn is doing.
>>> Oddly, it seemed to be looking for files from directory 270, which didn't
>>> exist at the time.  We came to the conclusion that was what was happening
>>> because these came up when one attempts to commit.
>>>
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270336",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270336",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270080",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270080",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270016",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270016",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270000",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/var/repos/svn/projects/db/revs/270/270000",
>>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>>
>>> Note, the directory 270 didn't exist.  According to google, this can
>>> happen due to either a hook or CI committing too often creating
>>> corruption.  We can't seem to clear the corruption though.  We are also a
>>> bit skeptical of its corruption as it should have cleared on a freshly
>>> restored repository.
>>>
>>>
>>> So over the weekend, we attempted to separate the projects on the repo
>>> to individual repos.  This is to reduce the size of the repo as it could
>>> have been causing the issue.  We however kept the revision numbers as they
>>> are in documentations and tags.  However, on the now small repo, with only
>>> 187 GB in size, but with the last successful commit # 269999, we still
>>> see the problem.
>>>
>>> This now looks more like a software bug than a setup issue.  We have
>>> "yum updated" the system in an attempt to make sure we have all the bug
>>> fixes out there but nothing works.
>>>
>>> Would anyone know if there is a transaction limit in the current SVN
>>> code?  Anyone have a repository with more than 270000 revisions out there
>>> please?  Any pointers to something we may have overlooked so far?
>>> Something else, the svndump is cleanly at 2 TB, any chance there may be a
>>> limit of how big a repo glow??  This was our first thought but since we
>>> have created smaller repos and the issue remains, it now looks far more
>>> like a sharding logic error to us.
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> William
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>

Reply via email to