[GTALUG] Calling all networking and SVN gurus

[William Porquet]

Silly-assed guess? Maybe the connection is being reset at the firewall
level, or by some network nanny/intrusion detection? Maybe it's based on
the source IP which has been flagged as bad for some reason?

"Intermittant and infrequent" was the phrase that made me wonder.

Good luck,
William Porquet

On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 13:14, Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> To forestall the inevitable suggestion: no, the solution is not to move to
> git.  At least not yet: for various reasons, it can't happen right now.
> This is the last holdout, all our other repos are already git.
>
> I apologize for the length of this dissertation: I've been doing my
> homework as fast as I can, and I want to provide complete information.
>
> I've just moved a previously semi-local (different building but "on
> campus") SVN server to a cloud instance (running Debian, SVN 1.9.5, and
> Apache 2.4.25, access via https://).  For the most part it went smoothly,
> but now our "on campus" Jenkins server intermittently loses the network
> connection on 'svn up' so the deploy fails.  That's bad.  What's far worse
> is that while Jenkins initially resumed these broken updates politely when
> the deployment was re-run, it's now decided that these resumes have left a
> locked workspace and it has to do a fresh checkout.  One of the problems
> with moving this repository to git is that SVN trunk is ~5G in size: a
> checkout to a local client takes 5-10 minutes, but for some reason a
> Jenkins checkout takes about 30 minutes (this is all pretty new to me, and
> I haven't had time to investigate that time difference yet).  An update
> takes a 60 seconds, but a new checkout takes 30 minutes - you can see where
> that causes delays in deployment.
>
> One possible mitigation is to trap the SVN failure, do a clean-up on the
> directory and re-run.  I may have to try this, but ... that's just
> mitigation, not a solution.
>
> The Jenkins server is on Windows (I wasn't given a choice) and mostly
> works well.  It uses Cygwin for all the SVN stuff (SVN version 1.11.x).
> It's also at a different physical location from me with different network
> rules.
>
> The critical lines of the failure error:
>
>     org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E175002: Connection reset
>
>     svn: E175002: REPORT request failed on '/svn/repo/!svn/vcc/default'
>
>
> (It being Java, the errors run to 40 or 50 lines: I think this is the only
> part that's important.)  Unfortunately, this is one of those errors that
> Google searches produce lots of questions, lots of speculations ... and no
> solid answers.  At least not that I've found.  Likewise, a lot of people
> want to know, as I did, about the relatively unusual filepath
> ("!svn/vcc/default") but I've never seen a solid answer as to what that's
> about either.  The logs show Jenkins requests against that filepath with
> both REPORT and PROPFIND, but Jenkins is only failing on REPORT.  Both of
> these request types are WebDAV extensions.
>
> Our staff don't seem to be having any trouble checking out or updating the
> repository across a mix of Windows and Mac clients.
>
> I've so far failed at getting more logging out of SVN and Apache: what I
> do have doesn't tell me much useful, at least not related to these failures.
>
> This problem is intermittent and infrequent.  I'm thinking the next step
> is network sniffing - although I'm hoping someone can suggest something
> better.  I'm relatively inexperienced with Wireshark and tcpdump (and SVN
> ...), but what experience I do have suggests all I'm going to get is to
> learn that SVN stopped providing data without finding out why or how to fix
> it.
>
> Any suggestions welcomed, thanks.
>
> --
> Giles
> https://www.gilesorr.com/
> gilesorr at gmail.com
> ---
> Talk Mailing List
> talk at gtalug.org
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>


-- 
William Porquet, M.A. ⁂ mailto:william at 2038.org ⁂ http://www.2038.org/
"I do not fear computers.  I fear the lack of them." (Isaac Asimov)
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