svnserve: Can't check path '/mnt/md6raid5/svnrepo': Permission denied

[Axel Werner <ma...@awerner.homeip.net>]

Hi Devs and SVN Experts!

Today i stumbled upon some problem while installing and configuring a 
simple SVN Server on my Ubuntu Linux. Once the software was installed 
and the xinetd been configured to i wanted to give it a try and see if 
the daemon is listening and answering via network. So i tried a ...

telnet localhost svn

and received an error message like this:

svnserve: Can't check path '/mnt/md6raid5/svnrepo': Permission denied


I made sure that my svnserve is been run as User "svn" (no loginshell, 
home is the repo directory) with full file permissions to the repo 
directory (770) which is been set to "chown -R svn.svn 
/mnt/md6raid5/svnrepo". So the "svn" user "SHOULD" have way enough 
permissions to access this directory. However it seems it doesnt.

After some searching on the net i found some old mailing list entry 
talking about some similar problem leading to do a "chmod o+x" for the 
svnrepo dir. So ive been testing giving o+x starting with the svnrepo 
dir and making my way up to the root.

For some Reason the damn thing wont work until the whole path to the 
svnrepo is set to o+x . WTF??

Why wont the User and/or Group permissions be sufficient in my case ?!?! 
A "direct addressing" of the path should work without having g+o on 
EVERY parent directory, but it does not. WHY??

Thanks for any help/explaination !

Best regards
Axel