HOWTO: Installing Subversion on ReadyNas NV+

A little side-track from the Continuous Integration Build Server series, but still related as it’ll be part of my CI infrastructure.

A few weeks ago, I bought myself a ReadyNAS NV+ RAID enclosure and fitted it with 4x500GB in a RAID5 setup. I’ve bought this because it’s about time I started implementing a decent backup solution. Up to now I’ve been either backing up by copying to external disks, or to a RAID 1 on an old desktop. Both solutions are only half as practical. The external disks can crash themselves, while the desktop takes up a lot more space and makes a lot more noise, an issue for me since I don’t have a basement to hide things in :)

Over time I’ve also acquired more and more machines, which started making backing up things a little more complex than they should be. So, the ReadyNAS now fulfills the role of a central file server, containing all my work-related data. Each machine still has its Temp folder where I drop junk in of course, but if something is deemed useful, I give it a nice spot on the RAID.

Now, documents, pictures, drives, etc. are one thing, and were very easy to get on the RAID: drag and drop in Explorer, FTP over with FlashFXP, use WebDAV, it all works. Source code is different. I have no real ambition to develop on a remote copy of my source. I’m also too spoiled by version control to go back to a single copy.

Solution? The ReadyNAS runs Linux, I can SSH to it, and it has apt-get on it, with some outdated SVN sources however, so it has everything needed to just compile Subversion myself :)

I will not go into detail on how to create an actual repository, only on how to set up the server. In my case, I had an existing repository running on a Windows svn 1.6.0 machine which I wanted to port over. The svn book will explain in detail how to use svnadmin to create a repository.

My SVN install is only using svnserve as the server daemon: no Apache, no tunneling over SSH, as it will only run on my local LAN for now. If the need arises later, I’ll revisit this article and post an update, but for now: YAGNI. I’m also using FSFS as a backing store, no BerkeleyDB.

Starting point

• I have a share called data.
• I created 2 directory trees on there: /Compile (will contain the SVN sources) and /Servers/Subversion/Repositories (will contain my ported repositories).

Prerequisites

• APT
• EnableRootSSH

Preparation

• SSH into your ReadyNAS and navigate to the folder you want to compile in (/c/data/Compile in my case).
• Get the latest Subversion source: wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/subversion/subversion-1.6.0.tar.gz
• Extract it: tar -xvzf subversion-1.6.0.tar.gz
• Get the latest APT sources: apt-get update

Setting up dependencies

To compile SVN we need build tools (gcc, autoconf, libtool) and various third party libs. I’m getting these through apt-get.

I’m putting the commands here with the -s switch. This will not do anything, simply simulate what would happen. When you’re confident, remove the -s and run it, and select Yes when it asks to go ahead.

Out of safety (paranoia?) I’m also doing apt-get clean after each install, don’t need all the downloads lying around.

apt-get -s install gcc autoconf libtool
apt-get -s install libapr1-dev
apt-get -s install libaprutil1-dev
apt-get -s install sqlite
apt-get -s install zlib1g-dev
apt-get -s install libdb4.2-dev
apt-get -s install nano
apt-get clean

Then fix a symbolic link:

ln /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.so.0.2.7 /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.so -s -i

On my system libaprutil-1.so pointed to a non-existing version, which made the SVN compile crash.

Compiling SVN

• Go to your extracted sources: cd /c/data/Compile/subversion-1.6.0
• Configure the sources for compilation: ./configure --build=sparc-linux --without-neon --without-berkeley-db --without-ssl
• Compile SVN: make
• Install the compiled binaries: make install

Configuring SVN

• Create or copy over a repository; in my case I copied an existing repo over to /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories.

• Add svn to /etc/services if it isn’t in there yet (it wasn’t for me): nano /etc/services

  svn           3690/tcp   # Subversion
  svn           3690/udp   # Subversion
  

• Make inetd handle SVN requests: nano /etc/inetd.conf

  svn stream tcp nowait david /usr/local/bin/svnserve svnserve -i -r /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories
  

  david is the user which svnserve runs under, in my case also the owner of the share. You could always create a separate svn user and svn share and set it up like that.

  -r /c/data/Servers/Subversion/Repositories indicates the root path for svnserve. This will correspond with the root level you expose to clients, and restrictive is good.

• Restart inetd: killall -HUP inetd

Using SVN

On your client, open up an SVN client, like TortoiseSVN, and enter svn://yournas/yourrepo as url, and everything should work! :)

Congratulations, you can now sleep at night again, knowing your source code is version controlled and stored on a RAID.