Redmine subversion won't ignore certificate error even if told

Question

I have set up a copy of Redmine through the Bitnami Redmine Stack and am having trouble accessing a remote SVN repository through https. The trouble seems to be related to the fact that I don't have a signed certificate, and the certificate provided doesn't match the host name (I am accessing the same server through a number of host names).

I am new to Ruby, Mongrel, Rails and Redmine.

Following the advice in this forum thread, I changed the path Redmine uses to invoke the svn client in \apps\redmine\lib\ redmine\scm\adapters\subversion_adapter.rb from

SVN_BIN = "svn"

to

SVN_BIN = "svn --trust-server-cert --non-interactive --config-dir c:/user/temp"

I was hoping that the --trust-server-cert option would fix the certificate problem. However, I am still getting the following error message in mongrel.log:

svn: OPTIONS of 'https://server.xyz:8443/svn/reponame': Server certificate verification failed: certificate issued for a different hostname, issuer is not trusted (https://server.xyz:8443)

Does anybody know what to do about this?

Additional info:

• I re-started the mongrel service after each change

• I am sure the configuration change has taken effect because subversion has created a full configuration directory in c:\user\temp

• I can access the remote repository using command line svn no problem

• The remote repository runs on a Windows box with VisualSVN

Solution 1

I kind of sorted it by setting the subversion server's host name to the one I query from the redmine installation. It would still be interesting to hear how this might be disabled.

Solution 2

I realize that this is an old question but it is still a common question. The short story is that you need to get Subversion to store the server certificate into the proper configuration directory.

From the command line run the following:

svn --config-dir c:/user/temp info https://<url_of_subversion_repository>

You should receive the following message:

Error validating server certificate for https://<url_of_subversion_repository>:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
 - The certificate hostname does not match.
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: <url_of_subversion_repository>
 - Valid: from Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:06:30 GMT until Tue, 09 Dec 2014 04:06:30 GMT
 - Issuer: <Cert Details>, <Cert Details>, <City>, <State>, <Country>
 - Fingerprint: <Finger Print>
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

Accept the certificate permanently. This will save the required information into the same configuration directory that you specified for Redmine and all should be good.