Out of Control®

This week we had to resolve an issue with Subversion on RHEL5. We use post-commit hooks to have external directories get an auto-update from the repository everytime someone check-in a file or update. This all worked fine on RHEL4 using sudoers. On RHEL5 we were getting Authentication failures each time we tried.

Turns out that RHEL5 has the /etc/sudoers file heavily modified with lots of yummy security goodness. A possible solution to this dilemma is to remove the line in the new sudoers marked Default reset_env. What this is does, is reload the environment variables to their default level. Subversion though, according to the official documents, performs the post-commit hooks using an empty environment. The best we could figure out was that sudoers tries to reload the environment variables just before the post-commit hook is run, and causes authentication to crap out. As soon as we commented out the default reset_env line in /etc/sudoers, our auto updates from SVN worked again!

Took a couple of hours to narrow it down to that problem, but we did sort it out in the end. Hope this helps someone else.