subversion on WebDAV with Active Directory authorization on SLES10

Okay, so I ended up toying with subversion via WebDAV on SLES today (I know, I know .. it’s bloody Sunday). It wasn’t much of a hassle though, after reading this. Sure, I made a few errors at first (simply confused the logic behind “Location” and “Directory“), but after that plain subversion commits via WebDAV (thus utilizing Apache) worked fine.

For POC or as a hint to myself, here’s where and what I needed to add/change:

Add the following modules to APACHE_MODULES in /etc/sysconfig/apache2:

  1. dav_svn (dav_svn needs dav, thus the need to add it too)
  2. dav
  3. authnz_ldap (authnz_ldap needs ldap, so again we need that too!)
  4. ldap

After that, we can add our repository (or our multi-repository folder) to /etc/apache2/conf.d/subversion.conf:

Now, as you can see, my goal was to not rely on a separate authorization database, but to use our already existing Active Directory at work. Generally this works just fine, but it didn’t. I tried various things, like trying another user, changing the group (as in the “require ldap-group“) as well as changing my own password. Zip.

All I got was this line in the error_log of Apache:

Now, that itself does tell you what is happening, but not why. So again, I ended up googling till I found this:

The suggested step was to add “REFERRALS off” to /etc/ldap/ldap.conf. Surprise, the file don’t exist. Heck, there’s that one in /etc/ldap.conf. I did that, still zip.

Did I get the wrong file ? Absolutely.

/etc/ldap.conf is used by nsswitch and pam_ldap, but not by openldap2 (which is what Apache is using). So reading this comment, adding the line to /etc/openldap2/ldap.conf, and *kaching*! Works.

Now I just need to install redmine (already installed ruby, rubygems and rubygem-rails from the SDK Addon), but I’ll leave that for tomorrow, today I’m gonna watch Band of Brothers.