SVN stopped working on BlueHost last week. After a bit of digging, I discovered that the configuration of OpenSSH had changed, limiting the $PATH for non-interactive shells to the default of /usr/bin:/bin. You can’t change it in ~/.bashrc; you can’t change it in ~/.ssh/rc.
So, I start talking to tech support. At first, they tried to be helpful, and apologized for the inconvenience. But today, I got this message:
“Openssh was upgraded for security reasons. Unfortunately the upgrade changed functionality and now some programs such as subversion and git no longer work the way they did previously.
“It appears that the old behavior may have been flawed in the first place and shouldn’t have worked. We are looking into how to restore previous functionality without any negative security impact, but we have a desire to keep our accounts and servers from being compromised and therefor any decisions on changing functionality will be made with that in mind, but for the time being we are not promising that the original functionality will be restored due to security reasons.”
Well, that’s that, then. Goodbye, BlueHost. You are no longer an adequate web host. I think I’ll give 1&1 another shot before I finally give in and go with Linode.
Update 2010-04-22: See Franklin Strube’s post below for a possible workaround. I haven’t tested his solution (I’ve already moved off of BlueHost), but it seems sound. Thank you, Mr. Strube.
Last time I tried installing SVN on a shared 1&1 server I got the following email:
This was a shared server but not sure if that made a difference.
Post back if you know a workaround.
Have you given up on dreamhost already?
I used DreamHost for a couple of years, but finally got fed up with the constant downtime (I think my sites were down more than they were up for the final two months). I’m definitely considering getting a DreamHost account just for SVN, though, and keeping live websites elsewhere. I’m just hoping for an all-in-one solution.
There is a workaround to this. By using a public/private key for svn+ssh connections, you can execute the ~/bin/svnserve -t command. All you have to do is generate the public/private key, add the public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys with ‘command=”~/bin/svnserve -t” ‘ at the beginning of the line in authorized_keys.
I wrote a blog article for setting this up: http://www.franklinstrube.com/blog/installing-subversion-on-bluehost