This text has been created for my personnal references. I have spent a lot of time on this and now that I was able to make it work I will document the steps that I have done. I am assuming that if you follow the steps in this document, you have a pretty good understanding of the basic of Linux. This is not a “how to” for Linux itself but for configuring Subversion with SASL and LDAP against an Active Directory server. Some useless background on why I want to do this: The company I work for is running more than 60 servers (all VM servers) of Subversion, all running on Linux with Apache2 and the authentication is done with the mod_ldap for Apache2 against our Active Directory Server. The server that host that user’s accounts is a Windows Server 2008 with Active Directory.

Remove admin user vesta panel Ubuntu. Problem with Codestriker. Router accessible from Windows but not from Ubuntu on the same machine.

So all the accounts are store in a MS LDAP DB, not an OpenLDAP! It’s a Microsoft server after all, so it’s not the standard LDAP protocol, but the Microsoft LDAP protocol. This kind of setup is called a Subversion over HTTP (or STUB). I won’t go into the details of that setup because it is already well documented on the Internet. This setup has been good for us since the last 3 years, but we are now having a lot of problems where the Apache2 service will crash when too many users are using the SVN server at the same time (we have more than 100 users accessing our SVN servers everyday). National Dobro Serial Numbers more. When Apache2 crash/freeze, we are not able to kill and restart the service live, we must reboot the server by doing a cold reboot since the server is waiting after the apache2 process to shutdown before rebooting.

Very annoying! So I want to use a system for authentication that won’t crash when there is a lot of users. I need something more lighter. But I want to keep our authentication to be done against our Active Directory server because we don’t want to manage a new database of all the accounts just for SVN. I have to drop the Apache2 part. Here come SASL. There is many authentication mechanism available for SASL and one of them is LDAP!

Now we are talking. With this new setup our current SVN protocol will change from to: svn://svnserver No big deal. Epa Design Manual Odor Corrosion Control on this page. We will lose the option of browsing with a browser (IE, firefox, etc.) in our repository.

So after many research on the Internet I had a lot of trouble to understand if that kind of setup is feasible or not. Lot of people are saying no, but I guess that’s because of the old version of subversion server (I.E. Previous version of 1.6.5). A lot of people said that they where able to make it work but after following some vague instructions it never worked for me. After a couple of days of tests and tries, I was able to make it work.

On to the setup itself! You’ll need a Linux server up and running, I used CentOS 5.5 32 bits. I installed Subversion server version 1.6.13. This setup will send the user’s info (login/password) as plain text over the network (that’s because of the LDAP call to the AD server itself).

I read that Subversion will not let authentication go through with clear text before version 1.6.5. I have not tested it with this specific version. Only with 1.6.13.

If you want a more secure way of sending the user’s account info on a network (like the Internet), then I suggest you use svn+ssh for the protocol – not documented here! Everything on the CentOS server has been installed using yum. Make sure that all these packages are installed, if any of them are missing, it won’t work! Subversion – I used version 1.6.13 db4-utils – I am not sure yet if I need this or not! Cyrus-sasl – The SASL authentication system cyrus-sasl-ldap – LDAP plugin for SASL cyrus-sasl-plain – for PLAIN login with SASL If you want to get the latest version of Subversion you’ll have to use a yum repository that contains it. By default the Subversion package that ship with CentOS is an old version, 1.4. Follow the steps in this link to connect your CentOS installation to the RPMForge repository to have the latest version: After you have connected to the RPMForge repository, let’s install all of that in one shot!

Run the following command: “yum install subversion.i386 cyrus-sasl cyrus-sasl-ldap cyrus-sasl-plain db4-utils” There will be other packages that will be installed with these for dependencies, just go ahead and install all of it. Once these steps have been done, you can check the Subversion version by running the following command, it will give you the version installed and also if it’s installed or not!