Subversion Database Administration Issues

Hello,

this is my first post, and i just joined, so apologies if this is a known issue.

i recently started using svn and am having some sticky issues. to
make sense of the problem, i will go over how i set things up, then
how it is breaking, and how i fix it. then you can let me know what i
am doing wrong.

Setup
the svn server lives on an intranet debian sarge install. it does not
have an external ip, nor would i want it to.

svn version 1.1.4-2

i created several repositories in /var/subversion/*
so, let's use /var/subversion/foo as an example.

1) i chowned /var/subversion to svn-user:subversion
2) i added all users who were allowed to access subversion to the
'subversion' group
3) i ran: svnadmin create /var/subversion/foo

then i tried to check the empty foo to an empty folder on my pc (using
tortoise) that will house my files. Permission denied.

the db creation was done as root, so root owned the entire repository.
 reasonable, though not what i wanted. so i chown -R
svn-user:subversion /var/subversion/foo

permission denied. so, then i notice that the group doesn't have
write access. ok. so i chmod -R g+w /var/subversion/foo

i try again, and permission is granted. i dump a bunch of files into
the repository, commit, and i am at revision 1.

essentially the process is working, but i have this nagging doubt that
i am not doing things properly.

Hitch #2
Periodically (I haven't been able to find a pattern in it) when
someone uses tortiose to check out a repository for the first time, it
will screw up the database, and i have to run svnadmin recover in
order to make it work again. once that happens, the permissions reset
and I have to do the chown/chmod shuffle again.

Questions:
am i doing this right? it seems pretty convoluted to me, and using
groups seems to make the most sense, how am i screwing this up?
do you know why the database gets messed using tortoise? is there
something that 'shouldn't be done' that i might inadvertantly be
doing?

anyway, thanks for your help.

-- 
p o l ~ l l o v e t
unbeingdead isn't beingalive
 -ee cummings
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