Tag Archives: RedHat

USVN with CentOS 5

If you are looking for a Subversion web interface, chances are you come across USVN (User-friendly SVN). I first used it in August 2009 during a complex proof-of-concept (PoC). The current version at the time was 0.7.2 and it was of great help. Nevertheless there were a few things missing, esp. LDAP support. So I was really happy to recently learn that the project is being continued (it is an end-of-studies project) and in fact one of the first new features is support for LDAP.

One of the challenges I came across during the installation was the systems check that reported “Subversion has not been detected”. This simply means that the Subversion client binary (svn) was not found on the search path (PATH). The reason for this in my case was the fact that I had done a custom installation of Subversion and not relied on the one that comes with CentOS. For details on this please check [cref 879 this post] where I also present a way to custom-define environment variables for the Apache web server. Here is the respective snippet with the search path added (my changes are in bold)start() {
echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
check13 || exit 1
LANG=$HTTPD_LANG LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib PATH=$PATH:/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin daemon --pidfile=${pidfile} $httpd $OPTIONS
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
return $RETVAL
}
With this amendment the system check passed just fine. It should be noted, however, that at least for v1.0.1 this check is not complete. E.g. it misses on PHP support for the database. So you most likely also want to install php-pdo and php-mysql:yum install php-pdo php-mysql SQLite did not work at a first try whereas MySQL did, so I went for the latter.

Use CollabNet Subversion with Regular Apache

CollabNet are providing up-to-date binary packages of Subversion for many platforms. In my case this is CentOS 5, which by itself only has a rather dated version of Subversion. So I downloaded and installed the client, server and extras packages from CollabNet. The server package comes with a bundled Apache and a pretty nice installation script. However, I wanted to use my regular Apache for hosting the Subversion repositories, which means that I had to include the Apache modules from the CollabNet installation. So here are the respective lines from /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.confLoadModule dav_svn_module /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/modules/mod_authz_svn.so
Those modules require access to additional libraries from /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib, so Apache needs to be told to include this directory into the search path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH). The bold part in the below snippet from /etc/init.d/httpd shows what needs to be added:start() {
echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
check13 || exit 1
LANG=$HTTPD_LANG LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib daemon --pidfile=${pidfile} $httpd $OPTIONS
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
return $RETVAL
}
Simply sourcing in LD_LIBRARY_PATH does not work, because the daemon function calls a separate Bash instance. The only way to feed environment variables into Apache, was by prepending them as shown above. This is also the approach to take for extending the PATH variable (which I needed to do for including /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin).

Oracle DB does not start

Sometimes people wonder why Oracle DB (both 10g and 11g) will not start after installation on Linux/Unix. In many cases the simple reason is the content of /etc/oratab. For each database it contains a line in the format $ORACLE_SID:$ORACLE_HOME:START_DB_FLAG:The last column is set to “N” by default. Just change it to “Y” and run $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart again. Your database should come up now.