svn problem (read-only lock)

Question

I'm having a slight problem with my svn repositories.

When I try checking out/updating/committing I get the following error:

svn: Can't open file '/home/svn/bl_webdev/db/txn-current-lock': Read-only file system

Is this likely a file permission issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

Read only filesystem indicates that the volume that was mounted is read-only. Is it a SD-Card (maybe write protected), or a volume on some fileserver that might be read-only for some reason.

Type mount without any parameter to see if the filesystem at that place was mounted read-only.

On Ubuntu boxes another possibility to have a read-only system is that there were errors on the partition (remount ro parameter after errors). In this case running a fsck and reboot might help out.

Answer 2

Yes, likely it's permissions. Make sure the user the svn server is run under has permission to write to the repository and all files/subdirectories. Remember that if you're using svn through Apache then the user will be www.

Answer 3

While this does seem to be an issue regarding how things are mounted, I have at least experienced this one time on a cloud instance.

A reboot fixed the problem, which is the simplest way to restore mounting sanity IMHO.

Answer 4

I had this problem on a Red Hat 7 box; it turned out to be SELINUX. I ran restorecon -R /var/svn and that got it working again. HTH some future googler.