Subversion 403 Forbidden
Recently, while developing on a Windows 2000 machine I got the following error when trying to commit some code into a subversion repository located on a Solaris server.
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKACTIVITY of ‘/repos/xxxxx’: 403 Forbidden
Took awhile to find the cause of the problem. It turns out that I had accidentally signed in the with an upper case in my username, which was fine for checking out the code but when trying to check in there was no matching username on Solaris.
Trouble was there was no visible indication that this was the problem. The cause was only revealed by looking at the server log.
Even then the fix was not straight forward, since I was using Eclipse and the Subclipse plugin, with no obvious way to reset the username and password.
So I checked out the repository again via the svn command line, explicitly setting my username.
(See: http://www.tigris.org/nonav/scdocs/ddUsingSVN_command-line.html ).
I made a change in the new repository and committed the change, again using the command line. This time the commit worked.
When I refreshed the project within Eclipse I could now see that the change I had just made was registered against my correct username while there were other outstanding changes registered against my incorrect username.
Funny thing was that as I made changes within Eclipse the new changes were now recorded against my correct username and I could successfully commit from within Eclipse.
It seems that the explicit check out of the repository to a different location had magically fix my username problem.