The machine running my Subversion server picked a good day to brick. After spending a couple hours fixing some permission problems in the domain, I found my SVN server non-responsive. Hooking up a monitor showed it not even POSTing. So the hardware is hosed and the backup is out of date. Thank goodness for SVN.
I took the hard drive out of the machine, popped it into another one and copied it all up to a storage volume on the network. I installed Subversion on a new machine, set up empty replacement repositories, and copied over the files from the dead machine.
Luckily for me it was all as easy as:
svnadmin dump /path/to/oldfiles > dumpfile
svnadmin load /path/to/newrepository < dumpfile
I can’t believe it was that easy. I deleted the scm server’s A record in DNS, added a CNAME record for the old name pointing to the new server and everything is working again. Thank you Subversion for being smart about recovery.
