svn - What ports need to be open for TortoiseSVN to authenticate (clear text) and commit?

Question

What ports need to be open for TortoiseSVN to authenticate (basic) in order to commit? I know it is not a good thing, but I believe username and password are in the clear right now.

Let me describe as much as I know about set-up, and what seems to be happening.

I am a contractor helping a state to deploy and modify a "mostly" public domain application. There is an SVN repository in a different state which contains the application, with read only privileges for everyone.

In order for me to work on the site that I want to deploy, I must create a VPN connection, and then use Remote Desktop Connection to access the machine where the deployment will reside. When I am on that machine, I can browse the repository and export or checkout anything. When I attempt to commit I am prompted with a username/password challenge, and it always fails.

When I am at my home machine, I can commit to the exact same repository and the exact same place using the exact same credentials. I have asked the repository manager to verify that the username I use has all the necessary rights to commit, and I am assured that I do.

So, even though I am getting an error message that describes something like "invalid credentials", I think that the authentication is being blocked. I am attempting to find out whether or not a default SVN installation would use the same listening SVN port, or a different one for authentication. I don't believe the authentication is encrypted.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Answer 1

What's the first part of your Subversion repository URL?

• If your URL looks like: http://subversion/repos/, then you're probably going over Port 80.
• If your URL looks like: https://subversion/repos/, then you're probably going over Port 443.
• If your URL looks like: svn://subversion/, then you're probably going over Port 3690.
• If your URL looks like: svn+ssh://subversion/repos/, then you're probably going over Port 22.
• If your URL contains a port number like: http://subversion/repos:8080, then you're using that port.

I can't guarantee the first four since it's possible to reconfigure everything to use different ports, of if you go through a proxy of some sort.

If you're using a VPN, you may have to configure your VPN client to reroute these to their correct ports. A lot of places don't configure their correctly VPNs to do this type of proxying. It's either because they have some sort of anal-retentive IT person who's being overly security conscious, or because they simply don't know any better. Even worse, they'll give you a client where this stuff can't be reconfigured.

The only way around that is to log into a local machine over the VPN, and then do everything from that system.