TortoiseSvn and Windows Server 2008 user account control.

Question

Here is the question:
Can TortoiseSvn work on Windows 2008 without turning off User Account Control?

Here is the story: I just moved my test server to Windows 2008 and I am having problems with TortoiseSvn. I am logged on as an administrator, but when I go to update some code from the Subversion repository, I get a message saying: Error Can't set file 'C:\dev\trunk.svn\entries' read-write: Access is denied So I have seen messages like that and I know to run cleanup. But when I run cleanup I get: Cleanup failed to process the following paths: C:\dev\trunk

So further investigation convinces me that I have a permissions problem. Running svn status from a command prompt shows me that the directories are locked and running svn cleanup fails just like the tortoise cleanup did. But when I launch the command prompt as an administrator, I can run svn cleanup with out a problem and I can run svn up and get my files updated.

UPDATE: This is a windows UAC permissions problem. Turning off UAC fixes the problem. But I would like to find a solution that doesn't require turning off UAC. Since Tortoise is a windows shell extension, I don't know how to make it run as administrator.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Take ownership and give yourself a full control on C:\Dev\Trunk.svn and children. That should solve your problem.

I would advise against turning off UAC. If you need to turn it off though, you can do it through Control Panel\User Accounts\Turn User Account on or off.

Answer 2

I use TortoiseSVN on Windows Vista SP1 with UAC turned on. I've had no problems. Since Vista SP1 and Windows 2008 are essentially the same operating system, I think you might be experiencing another problem.

SVN does a lot of renaming of temporary files, and it's not particularly robust if there's a sharing violation. I've found that some antivirus products will spot that SVN has just closed a (temporary) file. They'll scan it, and while they're scanning it, SVN attempts to rename it -- sharing violation: boom. Search indexers sometimes cause the same problem.

See if you can stop your source directories from being indexed, or prevent your AV from doing realtime scanning on them. You can exclude the directories, or you can exclude the TortoiseProc.exe process.

Answer 3

right-click on your working copy c:\dev folder, select "properties" from the context menu. In the properties dialog, go to the security tab. You will notice that the Admin user doesn't have full access (the user is not listed there). Add the Admin user and give it full access rights.

Yes, the Admin user usually has full access rights to all folders, but only after the UAC prompt. Applications usually don't provide the UAC prompt but get an access-denied error instead. To give the Admin user full access to that folder without the UAC prompt, you have to add that user manually.

Answer 4

You folks who are denying that there is a UAC specific problem are getting very annoying.

This is a real problem, with Windows 2008 and Windows 7. Certain files require elevated permissions to change them. This can be seen by trying to save files from notepad, or replace them by dragging in Explorer. I do not know the exact rules, but they seem to have something to do with whether the files have been used recently by a process which runs with elevated permissions, or files in protected directories like Programfiles or INETPUB.

Tortoise cannot run with elevated permissions. I end up having to use a commandline client running from an elevated command window.