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Posted to users@subversion.apache.org by ky...@panix.com on 2006/05/17 11:07:38 UTC
Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
This is my third post. Getting pret-ty desperate here...
Let's see. I have an svn repository with hundreds of thousands of
lines of code and about 2-years' worth of comments contained in it.
Since yesterday, svn has been failing in ***entirely random ways***.
Every time the only solution I have found has been to scrap the
current version of the repository, create a brand new repository with
sysadmin creaet, populate it from a recent repository dump with
sysadmin load, and repeat the changes done since that dump.
But every time this fix has been only temporary. Everything is fine
for a while, until suddenly svn begins to fail again, *unpredictably*
and in *entirely novel ways*.
In the first bout of failure all the error messages included the line
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
and sometimes also the line
svn: bdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version
After the reconstitution procedure described above (and correct
operations for some time), svn started failing again, but this time
the form of failure was silent: svn commands simply would hang
indefinitely, and would be unresponsive to kill -TERM.
I reconstituted everything again, and everything was fine for about 20
routine svn commands or so, and suddenly, again out of the blue,
failure. This time the error message is
No transaction named '6e' in filesystem '/home/jones/svn-repos/db'
Also, the command
svn co file:///home/jones/svn-repos SVN
again resulted in a hung process that had to be killed with kill
-KILL. In the above command the ./SVN directory did not yet exist, so
just for kicks, I created the ./SVN directory and repeated the
command. This time I immediately got a segfault (the first ever for
svn in my hands):
% svn co file:///home/jones/svn-repos SVN
zsh: 29440 segmentation fault svn co file:///home/jones/svn-repos SVN
In my 20+ years of programming and working on Unix I have *never* seen
anything like this.
The very helpful replies I have received to my previous posts have
focused on the details of the examples I have posted (e.g. BDB), which
is reasonable and understandable, but by now I hope it is clear that
these details are mostly irrelevant, because they change every time
and I still get unpredictable failures. The only constant across all
cases is svn's failure. (Curiously, svnadmin has performed
consistently throughout.)
What I desperately need are ***general*** troubleshooting techniques!
svn was working fine as of last Friday, and there has been *no change
whatsoever* to the installed software base since then. I didn't use
svn on Monday, and I spent all of yesterday fighting with it. I
thought I had the problem under control, when it resurfaced early this
morning.
I should point out that our sysadmin does a very good job of keeping
our system secure. In 6 years of operation it has never been
compromised, as far as we know. But this, of course, is always a
possibility. Then again, except for this problem I am having with
svn, the system is working fine. Out of about 30-40 regular users, no
one else has reported problems of the kind that would be consistent
with the hypothesis of a compromised system.
I could request that our sysadmin re-install svn from scratch, but
honestly, at this point I really can't tell whether this course of
action would increase or decrease the chances I will ever recover the
stuff in that repository. (And of course, if we simply re-installed,
we would never know what caused this disaster, so we would not have a
way to prevent it from happening again.)
Thanks a million!
kj
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Re: Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
Posted by Marc Haisenko <ha...@comdasys.com>.
This really sounds like a hardware problem to me, e.g. defective RAM or hard
disk. Could you try running the SubVersion server on a different machine ? Or
could you try replacing the RAM ?
C'ya,
Marc
--
Marc Haisenko
Comdasys AG
Rüdesheimer Straße 7
D-80686 München
Tel: +49 (0)89 - 548 43 33 0
Fax: +49 (0)89 - 548 43 33 29
e-mail: haisenko@comdasys.com
http://www.comdasys.com
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Re: Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
Posted by Ravi Giri <ra...@gmail.com>.
On 5/17/06, kynn@panix.com <ky...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> What I desperately need are ***general*** troubleshooting techniques!
Such ongoing issues point to an issue with either the underlying OS or h/w.
Try the following to isolate what might be causing the issues -
1. Move the repository to a different machine (with Same OS, SVN version)
2. Change filesystem backend to FSFS
3. Create a new SVN repository on the same system and populate it with
test/junk code and run some operations to see if any problems come up
--
Ravi
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Re: Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
Posted by Ryan Schmidt <su...@ryandesign.com>.
On May 17, 2006, at 13:07, kynn at panix.com wrote:
> I have an svn repository with hundreds of thousands of
> lines of code and about 2-years' worth of comments contained in it.
> Since yesterday, svn has been failing in ***entirely random ways***.
> Every time the only solution I have found has been to scrap the
> current version of the repository, create a brand new repository with
> sysadmin creaet, populate it from a recent repository dump with
> sysadmin load, and repeat the changes done since that dump.
[snip]
> The very helpful replies I have received to my previous posts have
> focused on the details of the examples I have posted (e.g. BDB), which
> is reasonable and understandable, but by now I hope it is clear that
> these details are mostly irrelevant, because they change every time
> and I still get unpredictable failures. The only constant across all
> cases is svn's failure. (Curiously, svnadmin has performed
> consistently throughout.)
The suggestion that BDB is the trouble, and that switching to FSFS
might alleviate it, is not irrelevant. Subversion with the BDB
backend is known to behave ridiculously in some setups. FSFS is known
to behave correctly.
If you have dumped and loaded your repository and still have a BDB
repository that means you are running Subversion earlier than 1.2.0,
because FSFS became the default as of 1.2.0. If that's correct,
please upgrade to the current release, 1.3.1, which probably contains
inumerable fixes.
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Re: Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
Posted by Johannes Holzer <hl...@arcor.de>.
Am Mittwoch, 17. Mai 2006 13:07 schrieb kynn@panix.com:
>
> svn co file:///home/jones/svn-repos SVN
>
You are connecting to Subversion via the "file" protocoll? You should verify,
that all machines accessing subversion fia "file://" have the same svn
version and BerkeleyDB-version. Just to be shure....
J. Holzer
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Re: Please help! I need *GENERAL* troubleshooting
Posted by Fabian Cenedese <Ce...@indel.ch>.
>This is my third post. Getting pret-ty desperate here...
>
>Let's see. I have an svn repository with hundreds of thousands of
>lines of code and about 2-years' worth of comments contained in it.
>Since yesterday, svn has been failing in ***entirely random ways***.
>Every time the only solution I have found has been to scrap the
>current version of the repository, create a brand new repository with
>sysadmin creaet, populate it from a recent repository dump with
>sysadmin load, and repeat the changes done since that dump.
>
>But every time this fix has been only temporary. Everything is fine
>for a while, until suddenly svn begins to fail again, *unpredictably*
>and in *entirely novel ways*.
>
>In the first bout of failure all the error messages included the line
>
> svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
>
>and sometimes also the line
>
> svn: bdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version
If you're doing a dump/reload anyway you can also try to switch
to FSFS. But I also think that this is hardware related. Have you
ever tried to create/run it on a different machine?
bye Fabi
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