Commit to VisualSVN fails auth rejected

3
votes

I have trouble making commits to a subversion repository powered by VisualSVN server. I can checkout code and update, so the username and password I am using is correct. However, when I am trying to make a commit, I get consistent Authorization failures. I have tried non-interactive, interactive, command line, svnX, Versions, all with the same result.

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKACTIVITY of 'xxxxxx/4a1e3c7e-8efd-47f0-abf6-80239ee625c8': authorization failed: Could not authenticate to server: rejected Basic challenge

The repository is obviously running under https.

I have been using other SVN repositories from the command line for years, and never had this problem. I have read many posts about this issue, but they all had issues with the authentication being locally stored by subversion being invalid, I cleared those caches, but nothing.

Especially since checkout and updates work, I am stumped. I can also log in into the Windows server that VisualSVN server is running on with the same credentials.

VisualSVN server version is 2.5.1 svn version 1.6.17 (r1128011) running on OSX

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

4
svnauthenticationauthorizationbasic-authenticationvisualsvn-server
I tried the same from CentOS with the command line client for svn. Same result. I also tried different configs for where subversion is supposed to store the password, e.g. .subversion/auth and Keychain.The password gets stored correctly, but no success. - user1871696
Does your password contain any non-ASCII symbols? E.g. £ (I mean the password of the account you attempt to login with) - bahrep
And what gets logged in VisualSVN Server's log on unsuccessful authentication attempt? See visualsvn.com/support/topic/00028 - bahrep
I eventually found out what was wrong. We are running two subversion archives in a master slave configuration and they use different authentication mechanisms. All the reads went to one archive where I had access rights with the password I was using, while the writes went to the other archive (irrespective of urls being used), where the password was wrong. - user1871696

4 Answers

0
votes

You should not be confused by the error wording. While one of the first things the error states is that the authorization failed the real informative part here is Could not authenticate to server: rejected Basic challenge.

Such behavior is very hard to troubleshoot without looking at VisualSVN Server log BTW.

When you see the error rejected Basic challenge it makes sense to troubleshoot the issue following a simple check-list:

  1. [Cpt. Obvious Mode ON] Check that the password is valid. You can see the error after entering an incorrect password 3 times in a row,

  2. Double-check that the password does not contain non-ASCII characters (e.g. £, ü, ä etc.). You can login to Windows with a password with non-ASCII symbols however Basic authentication type does not support non-ASCII chars. You can workaround the issue by switching to Integrated Windows Authentication however that's another question.

If none of the above steps help you need to troubleshoot the behavior on a deeper level:

  1. Check VisualSVN Server log. What get's logged on an unsuccessful authentication attempt?

  2. Check Windows Security log. You can see relevant events there which can clarify the behavior. E.g. you can see there an error 0xC0000064 that is caused by a Windows Server 2003 bug.

1
votes

I've been using VisualSVN Server and TortoiseSVN client for a while, and several times I've experience authentication errors when trying to access the repository from a new client installation.

After having a look at the event log (VisualSVN Server logs to the Windows event log) I noticed the error messages saying that the user was not found. However I know the user exists, and I have configured the server to use Subversion authentication.

I found that Subversion authentication uses case sensitive user names. The Subversion user begins with a capital letter and I try to use only lower case on the client. This has probably been the reason every time I've had this problem.

0
votes
  1. If your VisualSVN Server uses separate userfile for auth, login into Windows have no sense (it's unrelated to SVN login)

  2. You have to use CLI-client and have forced authorization in it on commit, i.e use

    --username ARG : specify a username ARG

    --password ARG : specify a password ARG

    --no-auth-cache : do not cache authentication tokens

    in command (write will be used in transaction guaranteed to be right login/pass)

If even this commit will fail with "authorization failed" then it can means only one: you have read-only access (at least to affected by commit part of repository-tree) in this repository

0
votes

in my case..svn folder was in Caps & path given in repo browser was small..