Subversion TCP4 and TCP6

I recently received the request to setup a new source repository for an international team located in India and Europe who will share code during development cycles. The main development will be done on Oracle PL/SQL code and due to the fact that TOAD has support to connect to Subversion and Subversion is know to most developers the decision was made to setup a subversion machine.

Even though I installed and used subversion systems before I now encountered something new. After installing subversion and starting svnserve I was unable to connect. checking if the daemon was running and checking the config it turned out all to be correctly running. Finnaly it leaded us to the networking part of the server. And even then it took me a second look before spotting the issue.

running a netstat -l grep svn command gave me the following line:
tcp6 0 0 [::]:svn [::]:* LISTEN

The second time I looked at the result it turned out that the subversion server was listing under the IPv6 protocol instead of the exepected IPv4.

When yous start svnserve you start it normally with svnserve -d to get it running in a deamon mode. It turns out that, at least under debian, it will pick the IPv6 protocol instead of the IPv4. you can solve this starting the deamon with the following command instead:
svnserve -d --listen-host=0.0.0.0

If you check your netstat info after that you will see the following:
tcp 0 0 *:svn *:* LISTEN

Now it was running on IPv4 and all my network routing was working and I was not blocked somewhere along the route.