Clients or Server taking a long time to authenticate using svn protocol

Hello everybody - first post

I built installed and the latest stable version (1.3.2) of Subversion onto a
Linux Debian sarge server.
Currently I am running the server as svnserve -d -r /repos as a non root
user. I am starting it using start-stop-daemon. I created a user and grp
that has no shell ie /bin/false.
The repository directories and files all have the same user and group as the
server with permissions set a 750.

I use Tortoise SVN as my client on WindowsXP and attempt to check out the
repository using the svn protocol and the svn client local to the server on
which subversion installed. (This will not be a Tortoise question)

If I comment out the entries show below in the svnserve.conf, I can check
out update add but not commit (authentication failed error). The server
response is very quick.

If I include the svnserve.conf entries I cannot use svn at all. The client
ask for a username and password (as expected), after entering the required
information correctly and incorrectly, TortoiseSVN just sit there for many
minutes, sometime timing out, sometime getting the files, mostly nothing at
all till I stop the client.

This happened a year ago when I last played with subversion and as a result
I abandoned the project. Now I really need it to work.
Please help!

I have set the svnserve.conf as follows:

[general]
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd
authz-db = authz
realm = testing

and the authz file, (isd being the repository):

[isd:/]
testuser = rw

and the password file:

[users]
# harry = harryssecret
# sally = sallyssecret
testuser = test123

Regards,

Gerhard Hannemann
Received on Mon Jun 19 05:46:51 2006