Author: Tor Håkon Haugen

  • Subversion – ‘502 Bad Gateway’ Workaround

    Parts of this article has previously been posted in my old blog. It’s being reposted because of its usefulness.

    A little over a year ago, I had a problem trying both copying and renaming files in Subversion, giving me the ‘502 Bad Gateway’ message. Trying to Google the problem didn’t help me much, and I don’t think it does to this date either.

    The error message was:
    svn: Commit failed (details follow):
    svn: COPY of testfile.py: 502 Bad Gateway (https://hostname)

    My solution to the problem was adding the following lines into my vhost-file, between the <VirtualHost *:443> and the closing </VirtualHost>. (I’ve placed them near the top.)

    SSLEngine on
    SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA;+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

    You must of course change the SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile variables to reflect your own setup. You must also restart Apache.

    I can’t guarantee that this workaround actually will work. But I’ve had good experience with it in two cases. In both cases I’ve run Subversion through Apache 2 web server, using the mod_dav_svn module, on a Linux platform. Also, since I have more than one domain name, the web server was set up with virtual hosts, ssl, proxy and rewrite modules.

    According to my original post about this problem, I wrote the following:
    I stole this solution from Karl Trygve Kalleberg, who fixed it once, and then later forgot how.
    Which, if my mind serves me correct, means that I found it when looking through his old configuration files.