Apache restarts now daily at 04:00 in SVNWEB

There are several problems affecting web access to SVN and these are being investigated and worked on. However one urgent problem is that the apache daemons can run out of semaphores. This means that the httpd daemon dies and once all httpd daemons have died on a machine, it is no longer accessible. It is certainly possible for this to happen on several machines eventually cutting access to the SVNWEB cluster (and Trac etc). This problem has become much more serious in the last few weeks. To avoid losing access, we have changed the automatic restart (and semaphore cleanup) of httpd daemons on all the SVNWEB cluster from once per week, to once per day at 0400, as it used to be. Note that this means all the httpd daemons are being restarted anyway each day at 0400, but this should not affect most people as this cluster is intended for interactive access.

Use SVN instead of SVNWEB for anonymous access

Please note that the SVN cluster should now be used for anonymous (guest) access as this cluster is set up to handle the load better and does not suffer from the semaphore problem. Eventually, anonymous (guest) access on the SVNWEB cluster will be disabled. To use the SVN cluster instead of SVNWEB, just replace one name by the other in the URL e.g.:
Old: http://svnweb.cern.ch/guest/$project
New:  http://svn.cern.ch/guest/$project
For those who have automated build scripts that access SVNWEB anonymously, please update these scripts to point to SVN instead. See http://svn.web.cern.ch/svn/news/svnannounce_10.html