Disaster recovery: simplest way re-create our svn on another Linux server, for dummies

Dear subversion community,

boy am I screwed! This is what happened: our small scientific business went bankrupt, and the more qualified IT bunch fled. My job was to shut everything down while recovering all the data, including 8 subversion repositories on a Debian linux server. And just now that trusty box broke down totally (and I mean black-smoke-totally). It was 5 years old, so fixing it would cost a lot, and we have nothing. However, we have very fresh full tape backup just before the crash. This I have recovered to another Linux server, and Red Hat EL4 this time. So I have the contents or /var/lib/svn where we kept the repositories. I do not have a fresh dump-file, or the very latest working copies of the repositories, due to the chaotic nature of business going out of business.

So the problem: I must temporarily re-create the svn service to another, much newer Linux-server, using db binaries from an old Debian box. I shuld be able to create a dump file and get latest working copy or export from each repository. And since the qualified people have left, I don't know how this is done. I am a Linux user, but never administered this system. I did not find similar issues from you archive (perhaps there is.) If possible, I'd love to skip the installation and configuration of apache2, and just do locally an 'svn checkout' and 'svnadin dump' in the simplest way possible, on Linux command line.

Our repostory db's are Berkeley type, and I found these hopefully relevant lines from file /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav-snv.conf:

# Uncomment the following 3 lines to enable Basic Authentication

  AuthType Basic

  AuthName "Subversion Repository"

  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd

Please help!

 
Received on Mon Sep 10 14:31:18 2007