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I hit a small problem with a subversion server I recently installed at work. It was nothing major, just the listing of repositories from the SVNParentPath folder was not working. It had worked when I initially set up the server and the repositories, but I later found that it was no longer working.

Digging through multiple forum and blog posts about it I found reference to some people getting joy from ensuring that the Location stanza in their apache config had a trailing slash. After not finding the solution through google I decided to stop looking for the easy solution and started watching the log files. What I found surprised me a little.

My location stanza looks like this:

<Location /repositories/system/>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /home/www/subversion/repositories/system
SVNListParentPath on

# access control policy
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_access

# authorisation section
AuthType Basic
AuthName “My Subversion Repositories”
AuthUserFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_passwd
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_access
Require valid-user
</Location>

And the log was showing this error:

Access denied: ‘jacob’ GET repositories:/system

In order to compare the error to an equivalent error for a path inside a repository that is legitimately blocked I added a test user and denied them access to anything inside the project1 repository. The url for the repository is http://my.svn.server/repositories/system/project1/ and the error message that I received was:

Access denied: ‘test.jacob’ GET project1:/

Lining up the error messages and the paths that each one was reporting I found that the problem was solved by adding a permission for all users to read the parent folder of the SVNParentPath into my AuthzSVNAccessFile file

[repositories:/]
* = r

I was surprised that I needed to put it a level back up from the location of the SVNParentPath folder, and believe that this may have been why there was so much speculation on the internet about what the solution could be.

I get the Australian IT ‘ping’ email and I have to comment on a story in today’s issue. Apparently KinderStart are suing Google for “downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning”. Now I’m not very up to date with this whole search engine thing, but I’m pretty confident that you actually have to have content on your site to get ranked.

I mean seriously, correct me if I’m wrong, but having a shitpile of links to other sites that you frame with your own header does not really consititute an information rich site. If anything that looks more like an attempted set of doorway pages to me, and we all know that this is frowned upon. Don’t we?

Obviously the smart people at KinderStart.com don’t understand this. Obviously Google is exacting some form of baseless punishment on the wonderful KinderStart.com site and they should be brought to justice for this heinous crime. The answer is obvious to anyone in the Litigious States of America, sue them!
Just a hint here folks, if you want good search rankings it pays to have good content.

For anyone that is interested, the Australian IT story can be found here.

I’ve started on a web project for a client using VS.Net 2005 and the .Net 2.0 framework.  This is the first project that I am undertaking in this framework and I am catching a few little teething issues as I go.  Some of them are obvious and some not so obvious.

The most un-obvious one that i have come accross so far was related to being able to debug the project.  I am set up working on my laptop which has both VS.Net 2003 and VS.Net 2005 installed.  I’d had the “unable to start debugging on the webserver” errors before in VS.Net 2003 and am fairly comfortable with what has to be done to correct the issue.  When I received that error this evening with VS.Net 2005 I followed the same path to try resolving it.

No good.  Doesn’t work.

After chasing links in circles through the online help I found a link to this knowledge base article that gives instructions on editing the permissions on the metabase.  Thankfully for my particular problem it was easy.  At the top of the article it says:

Note If you are using ASP.Net 2.0 and you have to grant metabase permissions to a Windows user account, run the ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool command with the -ga option instead of using the tool that is shown here.

A quick check in “Local Users  and  Groups” on my laptop showed that the windows user account  that ASP.NET runs under is ASPNET.

I ran

aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET

and was back in business.  Debugging is now working, pitty that my code is not - but that is another tale altogether.

I’ve recently starting working in VS.NET 2005 for some development that I am doing for a client.  This is the first time that I have undertaken anything using the 2.0 Framework and the updated IDE.  Having done a fair amount of development in VS.NET 2003 I have been using nDoc quite a bit.  I was quite dismayed to learn that nDoc was not compatible with the 2.0 Framework.

A little digging lead me to Jonas Lagerblad’s post about a improvements he has made to a port of nDoc 1.3.1 for .Net 2.0.  I am about to install this as it will give me the docs that I need for now, but I would be more comfortable having a complete version.  As yet I’m not doing anything that is not covered by this version, but that may change soon as I become more comforatble in the 2.0 Framework.

I was googling a little more about this to find feedback from others that have used this version and came across a nice little post on  Fabrice’s weblog. Someone representing themselves as the “main developer of NDoc 1.3 and the titular admin of the project” indicated that a complete rewrite has been undertaken for the 2.0 Framework and that the new version is in alpha testing at the moment.  Hopefully it won’t be too long until the new version is available.

This is just a mini rant about Visual Studio .Net 2003 and it’s inability to be concise and clean when creating HTML and CSS.

It understands the clean shorthand notation as follows

padding:6px 0;

but insists on turning that into

PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 6px; PADDING-TOP: 10px;

I can see no good reason for this, and no way to stop it.  At half passed midnight on a Monday morning I’m at work finalising some content for a project that is supposed to go live in less than 24 hours and I’m fed up with the cruft that VS.Net is producing.

I’m over it!

[censored]