Bug 734944

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I just installed Fedora 17 and found the same behavior with the current cyrus-sasl-2.1.23-29.fc17.x86_64 as I had with the older version -- same error messages to console and log.  

I couldn't downgrade to a lower version this time, so the workaround was to rebuild the rpms from source, with one important change to the cyrus-sasl.spec file:
54c54
< BuildRequires: libdb-devel
---
> BuildRequires: db4-devel
This causes the package to link with the Berkeley DB version 4.8 libraries rather than with the 5.2.  Now it works again!

It would be nice if cyrus-sasl worked with the version 5 Berkeley DB, but until it does, it should be built against the older version 4.

So it's probably due this commit:
commit 6f3490c81fcdeb8eee479201e56e65633de0a493
Author: Jan F. Chadima <jfch.eu>
Date:   Mon Jul 25 19:16:58 2011 +0200

    Add support for berkeley db 5


The commit itself looks fine. 

Could you please provide more specific reproducer so that I can setup it myself and try to reproduce? Thanks.

The original report contains all I know:  I was successfully using sasl authentication for several subversion repositories.  The sasl password database file type is
    (ohia:2.1)/etc/sasl2# file sasldb2 
    sasldb2: Berkeley DB (Hash, version 9, native byte-order)
When cyrus-sasl is linked to berkeley db 5, subversion fails with
"svn: Malformed network data" printed to console, and 
/var/log/messages containing line "svnserve: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasl2/sasldb2: Invalid argument".
My current workaround was to rebuild cyrus-sasl-2.1.23-29.fc17.src.rpm with the one change to the spec file listed in comment #3.
Apparently the "Malformed network data" message is a catch-all error message from subversion when something fails during authentication.  The log message suggests some incompatibility between either db4 and db5 file formats or the api for opening the sasl database file.  Perhaps the subversion server needs to be updated to work with db 5, but I would expect it to delegate that task to cyrus-sasl.

Please let me know what additional information might help.

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Subversion with sasl authentication works in Fedora 19 using component releases
cyrus-sasl-2.1.26-9.fc19.x86_64
subversion-1.7.10-1.fc19.x86_64