SOLUTION: "svn: No repository found" error with svn+ssh on the same host

I had a strange problem where a SVN working copy was working fine on one machine, but after file copying it to the same machine that the svn server lives on, any server accesses would fail with "no repository found". The breakthrough came when I tried to ssh in as the svn user, which should connect directly to svnserve and give some gibberish back, but instead was logging in with a waiting shell prompt. 

Why was this happening from the same machine and not another machine ?

The problem turned out to be how sshd authenticates. Somehow it wasn't trying the correct key in the .ssh directory, and defaulting to a password login.

The solution was to specify which key to use on the client side when connecting as the svn user for the svn server.

eg. in ~/.ssh/config :

Host your-svn-server.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/your-svn-key.ppk
    User svn

SOLUTION: svn: Can't open file '.svn/text-base/somefile.ext.svn-base': No such file or directory

I was getting this error and it seemed my working copy was corrupt. A sure fire way to fix this, if you can afford to, is to remove or move the folder with the error and update to get a clean copy. But just now I had this with a folder of 300MB of images.

The following quick hack worked though :

1. copy some other file like .svn/text-base/somefile.ext.svn-base in the same folder to .svn/text-base/somefile.ext.svn-base
2. update to a version of the repo before somefile.ext existed (or maybe changed - not sure) like this "svn update -r XXX"
3. update to the current version "svn update"

The above should get past the error by having a correct-looking file in the expected place. We then cause that file to be replaced with its correct content by causing svn to overwrite it