Beer vs Man

At 2Advanced we are using Subversion to manage project files, using LDAP for authentication on our Windows domain and Exchange server.

This system works very well, but when we switched to Windows Vista we started having intermittent issues on various workstations. TortoiseSVN, our svn client of choice, will occasionally fail with an “Unauthorized” error or other similar error message when doing a commit. We noticed that this normally happens during a longer commit, and TortoiseSVN will usually re-prompt for a username/password partway through the commit before failing. I’m not sure why, but sometimes Tortoise will use the Windows user’s credentials to access the repository, but sometimes it will prompt you to enter a username/password. In order to avoid getting the error message, you need to ensure that, if you are prompted to re-enter your username/password, you use the exact same string (matching case) that was used initially. If the strings dont’ match exactly, the commit will fail because it thinks two separate authors are sending the same commit.

I’m mostly posting this for my own reference because I keep forgetting exactly what’s causing this strange problem.

Another key when setting up SVN with LDAP on a Windows domain is to create a group for each user – including all possible permutations of that user’s username

username = DOMAIN\Username, DOMAIN\\Username, Username, DOMAIN\username, DOMAIN\\username, username

MyGroup = @username, @otherusername

[/MyClient/MyProject]
@MyGroup = rw
* =