Chris’ Blog

So it is the other side of the festive period and I am slightly better for it, financially. Next pay day should be even better, worked over 70 hours plus in 2 1/2 weeks. I bought myself a new phone over Christmas, it is a Nokia 3110c, and I got it for cheap using staff discount - not complaining. I’ve filled it up with a 2GB SanDisk MicroSD card from the ever fantastic SVP and now use it as my music player as well.

I started up a little project after I got a new phone with the basic aim to write a basic webmail client in PHP optimised for portable devices, its untitled so far. But it is very light on resources making use of PHP 5 with the IMAP Extension, and memcached for caching of IMAP data. I will make the source available via Subversion soon enough.

Over the holidays I have just had a made some serious changes to my server configuration, doing away with my reliance on Linux-VServer because it is just not stable enough. One of the instances crashes it generally will not sort itself out in a reasonable time without a reboot of the entire host, what I was trying to avoid. So instead I have moved most stuff back onto sandman proper now, the exceptions are a couple of things which need Debian Testing which still run on a VServer host. I hope to remove the need for these and then remove VServer totally and install OpenVZ which appears to be much more robust.

I am now using Lighttpd to serve the bulk of my web content because it has much lower resource usage than Apache and is fairly extensible and customisable, certainly more so than Apache until I discovered mod_macro. It does have some draw backs to Apache, like I cannot do PAM authentication or run Subversion without piggy backing it through Apache and certain configuration drawbacks. But considering the only VHost that really needs PAM authentication is my Subversion repository and that cannot move away from Apache I think I am okay.

So, this is the second time I have tried to address the problem I was getting with some Subversion repositories I was trying to configure to be served by Apache. I was trying to use the SVNPath directive to serve one repository but it was not having any of it, so instead I ended up serving them as a temporary measure using SVNParentPath in the format http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which is not what I wanted. I am using the Location container in Apache configuration to configure up my repositories, the path I had specified was /~name/. This is where the problem comes in, I would try to checkout the repository over the network and be greeted with a 405 Method Not Allowed error like so:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/~name'
svn: PROPFIND of '/~name': 405 Method Not Allowed (http://svn.example.com)

This stuck me as odd, it seemed the Apache was not serving the repository URI using the WebDAV module. When I gave up on an earlier attempt I reverted to using SVNParentPath and accessing the repository over the URI http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which worked perfectly and I couldn’t spot why. Turns out I made a single character mistake, my Apache configuration was set to use the path of /~name/ I should have used /~name because SVN truncates the trailing slash even if you specify it on the command line. Bugger!