Svnserve Based Server

This week I decided to update my Subversion components and it did not go well. The first surprise was after updating my version of TortoiseSVN  to the 1.7 version, my Subversion icons disappeared. The fix was simple but it reminded me that it had been a long time since I updated the Svnserve server I was using from CollabNet. This would also be a nice time to add HTTP access to the repository. So I downloaded the CollabNet Subversion Edge Server and tried to get it to work with my existing repository. I ran into several problems(e.g. viewvc exception).  While researching the solutions I decided an easier solution to my problems was to install the VisualSVN Server. So I uninstalled the Edge Server, installed VisualSVN Server, and imported my repository. This worked for HTTP access but I still wanted Svnserve access since I had existing folders checked out via this method. The VisualSVN bin directory has the current version of svnserve so I needed the instructions for installing it as a windows service.  The instructions I found, Svnserve Based Server, worked for me but not until I stopped fixing things I should not be fixing in the “unusual command line” format.

Note the rather unusual command line format used by sc. In the key= value pairs there must be no space between the key and the = but there must be a space before the value.

So now I have a relatively simple Subversion server solution that works for both svnserve and http access and it should be easy to maintain.