About Cyber X Designs

Cyber X Designs, our New Jersey based web design firm,  is fanatical about securing its client’s code base. And for this task we love SVN. SVN is a version management system. We use it to control the source code for our projects. For lay people, it is a database of every change that was made to any file saved in the version management system. Using SVN we can review the history of changes to a file, see who changed it and restore old versions. One of our favorite pharma clients is located in Florham Park and they have no less then three of their projects managed in SVN.

There is no worse feeling then having lost a bunch of work because of a hard drive crash or a fat finger. So yesterday while migrating a repository for one of our New York based clients we discovered that trying to export a large repository over a Samba share to a Windows storage solution was a no go.

The error we received was: svnadmin: Can’t write to stream: File too large. We were running the following command: svnadmin dump /foo/bar/ > /mnt/storage/backups. Our SVN version is 1.4.4 and our version of Apache is 2.0.59. Our exported repo is about 4GB. It seems the export was failing around 2GB.

Our first suspicion was that we had the wrong APR or there was no large file support in our version of APR. So we recompiled Apache and Subversion a handful of times. Each time no success. Finally, it dawned on us to try and export the repo to the local file system. That worked. So the final resolution is that we are exporting the repo locally and then compressing and copying the dumpfile to the storage solution using a bash script.

We searched for a solution to this problem all day yesterday and never happened across the fact that there might be a problem when exporting a large repo over Samba. Hopefully, you will find this post in your search and it will save you some time.