Raspberry Pi Server: SVN Upgrade

My original plan was to upgrade my Raspberry Pi server to a new Pi 3, and use the original Pi 1 B+ for the Retro Pie. I've since backtracked for various reasons and put the Retro Pie SD card into the new Pi 3. So now my original server is back on the Pi 1 B+. The server had been working great except it was running out of disk space (only had a 4 GB SD Card).

Fairly simple to solve, I'll just use an external USB drive for storage! I plugged in a 32 GB USB drive, and now I needed to move my repository.

First I needed a folder to act as my reference location when I wanted to access the USB drive. It doesn't matter too much where, I went with: /media/usb

Created the folder with: sudo mkdir /media/usb

Set the ownership of the folder with: sudo chown pi /media/usb

Set the permissions of the folder with: sudo chmod 0777 /media/usb

After plugging in the USB device, I needed to know the device UUID by typing: sudo blkid

Then I needed to edit /etc/fstab for it to automount on boot: sudo nano /etc/fstab

For my new mount, I went with:

UUID=390A1652      /media/usb      vfat    uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=0000,sync,auto,nosuid,rw,nouser,nofail 0 0

As an alternative, I could specify to automount any USB drive that is plugged in as /dev/sda1. That seemed risky to me though as my current drive could change and the new drive could connect as /dev/sda1. That new drive wouldn't necessarily be vfat.

If I had wanted to mount any USB drive, the line would have read:

/dev/sda1        /media/usb      vfat    uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=0000,sync,auto,nosuid,rw,nouser,nofail 0 0

Lots of options and opinions on this:

uid & gid are my username; some references suggest entering the numeric value. You can check your account's id by typing: id -u and id -g. Turned out my pi user was 1000.

umask=0000 is the equivalent of chmod 0777 (everyone has read/write access).

sync has input and output be synchronously.

auto instructs the drive to mount automatically at bootup.

nosuid I don't understand, but one reference says: Block the operation of suid, and sgid bits.

rw to mount the drive with read-write access.

nouser permits only root to mount the filesystem.

nofail causes startup to not wait 90 seconds / error out if it fails to find the drive.

And finally reboot the Pi via: sudo reboot

The next task was to move my existing SVN repository to the external drive...

I stopped Apache which is used for SVN: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

I copied the repository over: cp -r repos /media/usb

Then I modified the Apache configuration to point to the new location of the SVN repository. The config file is located in /etc/apache2/mods-available, file dav_svn.conf: sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf

My SVNParentPath was /home/pi/repos, I changed it to /media/usb/repos

Apache actually needs ownership of the repository folder, so I changed ownership to www-data: sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /media/usb/repos

And finally, restart Apache: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I did a full restart to make sure everything came back up, and it did! So my SVN repository now has 32 GB to play with; far better than the few hundred MB from before.

The above instructions were mostly just for my reference in case I need to do this or similar again in the future, but I hope it can be of help to others!