RE: Commit - 500 Internal Server Error in response to POST request

David,

You hit on the problem actually. "The first obvious question is whether the
.so files that Apache sees are for 1.7.6. Your CentOS distribution comes
with an older version already installed; you need to replace that in its
entirety." Since this is an WHM/cPanel server, I have to use EasyApache to
compile Apache. I assumed that their Mod_Dav module would work with SVN
1.7.6. Thus, I deleted all vestiges of SVN and recompiled SVN v1.6.18,
rebuilding the repos. Lo and behold, I can commit now. So there we have it,
Subversion 1.7.6 doesn't seem to be compatible with WHM's Apache v2.2.22.
Now I'll have to recheck out some repositories, but at least it's working! I
should have thought of this earlier. Thanks for pointing me in the right
direction!

Mitchell Killian

From: David Chapman [mailto:dcchapman_at_acm.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 5:26 PM
To: Mitchell Killian
Subject: Re: Commit - 500 Internal Server Error in response to POST request

On 9/20/2012 2:19 PM, you wrote:

Guys,
I've been beating my head against a wall for the last several days trying to
figure this out. I'm moving my SVN repo to a new server. Shouldn't be too
big a deal. I made the data dump, transferred it to my new server, installed
svn v1.7.6, created the repo and imported the data dump into the new repo.
No problem at all. In fact, I can browse to the repo and view all of the
files. However, when I try to create a directory or commit changes to the
new repo, I get this error message:
Commit failed: Server sent unexpected return value (500 internal server
error) in response to POST request for '/repos/!svn/me'

I've thought it was a permissions issue, so I've tried every kind of
user:group combo that I can and even given 777 permissions to the SVN repo
folder and contents but to no avail. I've assigned nobody:nobody,
username:nobody, and username:username but no user:group combo seems to
work. For the life of me, I can't figure it out. Let me give some info about
my system.

I'm swamped, so I don't have time for analysis (and comparison of your
Apache setup to mine), but the first obvious question is whether the .so
files that Apache sees are for 1.7.6. Your CentOS distribution comes with
an older version already installed; you need to replace that in its
entirety.

The other thing to try is create a very small test repository (empty is
probably sufficient since you are having problems with commits), then define
a minimal Apache installation with as few features as possible: no hook
scripts, no virtual hosts, no extra modules, etc. If you get the same
errors on a bare-metal Apache/Subversion server configuration, it will be
much easier for people to help. Otherwise you have to hope that someone had
exactly the same configuration as you and can point directly at the issue.

It seems like you have a redirection problem; I'd look at the interaction
between DocumentRoot and SVNPath. My non-VirtualHost DocumentRoot points to
a completely unrelated directory; the DocumentRoot in my Subversion
VirtualHost points to an empty directory. Only the SVNPath directory points
to a non-empty directory - the repository itself. I believe you need to
ensure that you don't point Subversion requests at the same directory (or a
subdirectory) as your DocumentRoot.

Your edited httpd.conf and log files might hide interactions between these
two variables, making it hard for someone to analyze. (This is another
reason why small test repositories are so nice - no editing required to
remove proprietary data.)

Good luck!

-- 
    David Chapman      dcchapman_at_acm.org
    Chapman Consulting -- San Jose, CA
    Software Development Done Right.
    www.chapman-consulting-sj.com