Re: SVNServe and firewalls

Thanks for the ideas!

Unfortunately we have outsourced our hosting and our hosting company only supports Apache 1.3 running on Red Hat 9 :(. We may switch hosting companies anyway but not for some time. We will try to give the svn+ssh a shot since our partners use SSH to log onto servers at a couple of their corporate offices. Our partners only have two developers who really need access so setting up two shell accounts isn’t a big deal. I guess a better long term solution is to just use the svn Apache 2 module and use https:// to access our repositories. As for the socks options I will have to wait until Monday (it’s the weekend here in the States) and talk to them directly.

Thanks again for the quick responses!

Rob.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Proulx [mailto:bob@proulx.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:06 PM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: SVNServe and firewalls

Robert Murphy wrote:
> My company is trying to share a repository that is hosted using
> svnserve. Unfortunately our partners have a rather restrictive
> firewall and are unable to retrieve or send updates to the repo.

To be clear let me repeat what I am reading. You are hosting the repository. You think the access to the repository from the outside world is fine. But your partners are having trouble getting to it because they cannot get out of their restrictive firewall. You think the problem is on their end getting out.

> We tried to be clever hand have svnserve use port 80 and have it bind
> to a specific host name but to no avail. I have seen previous posts
> concerning firewalls but those dealt with the Apache module and not
> the stand alone server. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Can your partners get out using ssh? If so then they should be able to use the svn+ssh:// method. This will use port 22. This does unfortunately mean shell access to your server. Special and more restrictive configurations are available.

Many times restrictive corporate firewalls will provide alternate access methods such as a "socks" server. Frequently this is not known to users. Check to see if your partner has a socks server is available to get access outside their firewall. This is the case at my employment. We configure ssh to use socks to connect out. Then the svn+ssh:// method is available. If socks is available then you could also use a "socksified" svn client directly instead of using a "socksified" ssh client with svn+ssh. Feel free to mail me directly with socks questions because that would be off-topic for this list.

I personally like using the svn+ssh:// method and use it whenever possible by preference. However issues such as the one you are seeing have been a push to use the https:// method. Using http/https works through most firewalls and is more seamless in port environments such as MS. Using https:// would likely solve your problem. Is it possible for you to set up an apache2 installation to host a WebDAV interface? What system is hosting the repository? For instance I am using Debian GNU/Linux and this is quite easy to install and configure there.

Bob

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