Adding new files into SVN: 503 Service Unavailable for PROPFIND request (working again)

Question

Just recently (a week or so), literally out of the blue, our SVN repo has stopped working when adding files:

Command: Commit  
Adding: C:\Users\user\Develop\test_trunk\utilities\Filter.cpp  
Error: Commit failed (details follow):  
Error: Server sent unexpected return value (503 Service Unavailable) in response to   
Error: PROPFIND request for '/svn/projects/!svn/wrk/c5e43308-72bc-2b46-936d-40923f39cf34/trunk/utilities/Filter.cpp'  
Error: Server sent unexpected return value (503 Service Unavailable) in response to   
Error: PROPFIND request for '/svn/projects/trunk/utilities/Filter.cpp'  
Finished!:   

Checking out, modifying files and committing changes works. But not to add new files.

No one has touched the machine, no upgrades, nothing. My TortoiseSVN client has not changed. Really, REALLY annoying! I just HATE when things break for NO apparent reason at all.

OS: Ubuntu 8.04, SVN version: 1.4.6

Also tried cmd line client. Same problem.

Edit: There are several repos beside each other, and 1 of 3 works, i.e. in one repo of three, it is possible to add files (!!)

Edit 2: News flash! It started working again. By itself. And nobody has done anything to the server. Sigh... All I did was to:

1. Create a new empty repo, then load it with the dump from the non-working one
2. Made sure www-data owns the repo files (as in all the other repos)
3. Relocate my working copy to the path of the new repo
4. Add files to the repo, which worked fine
5. So to verify the problem, I went back to another working copy which points to the non-working repo, and tried adding the files there aswell, which now worked. Go figure...

I.e. I didn't touch ANYTHING in the old repo. Someone somewhere said that revision control is either reliable, or worthless. Hear, hear...

Answer 1

Open your SVN config. If you're using TortoiseSVN, it's context menu -> Settings -> General -> Subversion configuration file: Edit.

If you don't know where to find the file: Where is the user's Subversion config file stored on the major operating systems?

Go to the [auto-props] section and add the mime-types for the files you're trying to commit. For example, I couldn't commit image files and fixed the issue by adding:

*.png = svn:mime-type=image/png
*.jpg = svn:mime-type=image/jpeg
*.gif = svn:mime-type=image/gif

Answer 2

Maybe this thread will help: 503 Service Unavailable only for new files.

The last message in the thread (here) says:

I finally figured out what was going on.

It was .htaccess rule that said "ErrorDocument 404 /index.php". After commenting that out, Subversion stop complaining about errors and now everything works.

In addition, there might be some relevant information in Apache's access log/error log.

Answer 3

You may face such issue if forward (perform reverse proxy) from HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa. Check that out.