Re: How to serve a repository from a filesystem with no access right support?

> What you can do is move the repository over to a real *nix filesystem. NTFS is not the best designed filesystem in existence (it scales badly with the number of files in a directory) and the NTFS compatibility drivers in Linux are not what anyone would consider particularly robust or complete.
>
> There is no reason to have the repository on an NTFS drive if you are running the server under Linux. If you were doing this so that Windows clients could access it via file:// protocol, you are just fooling yourself. It is much more efficient to put the repository on a dedicated Linux server and use http:// access. It is even possible to use NTFS security to manage the authentication
> (say, with mod_ldap).
>
Well unfortunately there are "political" reasons that make this
impossible. Believe me if I could serve everything via apache/http from
a regular unix filesystem I would do it in a heartbeat..

Anyway the problem seems to be quite trivial and is due to my
inexperience with linux: the ntfs-3g driver actually does complete chmod
and chown silently as expected but the fact is these can only be called
from the owner of the file. If you have write access but are not the
owner you can't call these. When mounted the entire partition containing
the svn repository is owned by an "ntfs" user and an "ntfs" group with
write access of everyone on the group. The "apache" user is on that
group as well and although it can read/write it can't call chown/chmod
because it owns none of the files. I tested this on an XFS partition and
chmod/chown behave in exactly the same way: only the owner can call them.

So what I did was to edit the umask,fmask,dmask options in /etc/fstab to
make apache the owner of the partition and it should work.

If anyone knows if the mod_dav_svn has some fine-grain options via which
I can make the apache process switch it's user and group while accessing
the repository please feel welcome to tell me.

Cheers,
Todor

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