HOWTO: Installing Subversion on ReadyNas NV+

A little side-track from the Continuous Integration Build Server series, but still related as it'll be part of my CI infrastructure.

A few weeks ago, I bought myself a ReadyNAS NV+ RAID enclosure and fitted it with 4x500GB in a RAID5 setup. I've bought this because it's about time I started implementing a decent backup solution. Up to now I've been either backing up by copying to external disks, or to a RAID 1 on an old desktop. Both solutions are only half as practical. The external disks on themselves can crash, while the desktop takes up a lot more space and noise, an issue for me since I don't have a basement to hide things in :)

Over time I've also acquired more and more machines, which started making backing up things a little more complex than they should be. So, the ReadyNAS now fulfills the role of a central file server, containing all my work-related data. Each machine still has it's Temp folder where I drop junk in of course, but if something is deemed useful, I give it a nice spot on the RAID.

Now, documents, pictures, drives, etc. are one thing, and were very easy to get on the RAID, drag and drop in Explorer, FTP over with FlashFXP, use WebDAV, it all works. But for source code however, I have no real ambition to develop on a remote copy of my source, not only that, but I'm spoiled by the benefits of version control that I don't want to go back to one single copy.

Solution? The ReadyNAS runs Linux, I can SSH to it, and it has apt-get on it, with some outdated SVN sources however, so it has everything needed to just compile Subversion myself :)

I will not go in detail on how to create an actual repository, only on how to set up the server. In my case, I had an existing repository running on a Windows svn 1.6.0 machine which I wanted to port over. The svn book will explain in detail how to use svnadmin to create a repository.

My SVN install is only using svnserve as the server daemon, no Apache, no tunneling over SSH, as it will only run on my local LAN for now, if the need arises later, I'll revisit this article and post an update, but for now: YAGNI. I'm also using FSFS as a backing store, no BerkeleyDB.

P.S.: Shell commands are marked italic.

Starting Point

  • I have a share called 'data'.
  • I created 2 directory trees on there: /Compile (will contain the SVN sources) and /Servers/Subversion/Repositories (will contain my ported repositories)

Prerequisites

Preparation

Setting up Dependencies

To compile SVN we need build tools (gcc, autoconf, libtool) and various third party libs. I'm getting these through apt-get.

I'm putting the commands here with the -s switch. This will not do anything, simply simulate what would happen, when you're confident, remove the -s and run it, and select Yes when it asks to go ahead.

Out of safety (paranoia?) I'm also doing apt-get clean after each install, don't need all the downloads lying around.

  • apt-get -s install gcc autoconf libtool
  • apt-get -s install libapr1-dev
  • apt-get -s install libaprutil1-dev
  • apt-get -s install sqlite
  • apt-get -s install zlib1g-dev
  • apt-get -s install libdb4.2-dev
  • apt-get -s install nano
  • apt-get clean
  • Fix a symbolic link: ln /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.so.0.2.7 /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.so -s -i (On my system the libaprutil-1.so pointed to a non-existing version? Which made the SVN compile crash)

Compiling SVN

  • Go to your extracted sources: cd /c/data/Compile/subversion-1.6.0
  • Configure the sources for compilation: ./configure --build=sparc-linux --without-neon --without-berkeley-db --without-ssl
  • Compile SVN: make
  • Install the compiled binaries: make install

Configuring SVN

  • Create or Copy over a repository, in my case I copied an existing repo over to /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories
  • Add svn to service, if it isn't in there yet, wasn't for me: nano /etc/services svn 3690/tcp # Subversion svn 3690/udp # Subversion
  • Make inetd handle SVN requests: nano /etc/inetd.conf svn stream tcp nowait david /usr/local/bin/svnserve svnserve -i -r /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories david is the user which the svnserve runs under, in my case also the owner of the share. You could always create a separate svn user and svn share and set it up like that. -r /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories indicates the root path for the svnserve, this will correspond with the root level you expose to clients, restrictive is good.
  • Restart inetd: killall -HUP inetd

Using SVN

On your client, open up an SVN client, like TortoiseSVN and enter svn://yournas/yourrepo as url, and everything should work! :)

Congratulations, you can now sleep at night again, knowing your source code is version controlled and stored on a RAID.

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