Fixing connection issue for Subversion: “svn: E120171: Error running context: An error occurred during SSL communication”

Subversion (SVN) is a source control management tool that hosts code files where developers can checkout and collaborate with each other. However, git is still the most popular source control management tool, and many enterprises want to migrate from Subversion to git. One customer had a Subversion setup in a Windows server machine and a client setup in Red Hat Linux (RHEL) box, and the customer wanted to connect to Window’s Subversion from Red Hat Linux box so the migration to GitHub can be carried out.

First, to make sure that the client side (RHEL) can reach out to server side (Windows server), we had to check the connection. This can be done from the client side, but it really depends on what machine it is.

If this is a Linux/Mac client:

ping URL_TO_TEST

If this is a Windows client:

Test-NetConnection -Port SOME_PORT -ComputerName "URL_TO_TEST"

where URL_TO_TEST is either the URL where the Subversion server is hosted or an IP address. SOME_PORT will be whatever the port it it trying to connect to.

In Windows, you can also trying this:

New-Object…