This article applies to the subversion server svnserve, version 1.6.

When connecting to my subversion server I got the error message "Authorization failed". The error message appeared in the svnserve log file and was also presented to me via the Tortoise front-end. The problem looked a mystery to me. It seemed that all my configuration files were correct. I did not make it that complicated either, since all I was using was svnserver with basic authentication and authorization.

I found on the web that "Authorization failed" means that I was able to log in with my username and password but that my subversion user did not have the right viewing and update rights. So I looked into the file MyRepo/conf/authz on the server and found the problem there.

The default configuration in file authz has the following lines:

# [repository:/baz/fuz]
# @harry_and_sally = rw
# * = r

Initially I uncommented these lines and changed them into the following:

[repository:/aDirectoryInMyRepo]
harry = rw
sally = r

This was wrong, since my repository name was allProjects instead of repository. So the authorization problem went away after changing these lines above into the following:

[allProjects:/aDirectoryInMyRepo]
harry = rw
sally = r

With this new setting I could check out files from Tortoise. But I was still unable to check in files using emacs, version 23.1.1, even files in the folder aDirectoryInMyRepo. So I had to change the lines again to get things right with emacs:

[allProjects:/]
harry = rw
sally = r