OpenVPN Permission Denied Error

Figured out my own answer. Derp.

So I figured out that since I'm running an apache svn server, svn commands are run as the user the httpd process is running as.

So first I ran ps aux | egrep '(apache|httpd)' and came up with this:

nobody    1488  0.0  0.2  99604  4960 ?        S    06:02   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
root      1962  0.0  0.0   4140   668 pts/0    S+   06:28   0:00 egrep (apache|httpd)  
root     11404  0.0  0.2  99208  5188 ?        Ss   Jul24   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
root     27766  0.0  0.1  99208  2340 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
nobody   27767  0.0  0.2  99604  5184 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
nobody   27768  0.0  0.2  99568  5188 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
nobody   27769  0.0  0.2  99604  5196 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
nobody   27770  0.0  0.2  99568  5168 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  
nobody   27771  0.0  0.2  99568  5184 ?        S    00:18   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL  

Well, there's the problem. The apache processes are running as 'nobody' not 'apache' or 'svn' or anything.

There are two possible solutions for this (I only tried one).

The one that I did (and that worked) was to go into httpd.conf, and change the lines:

User nobody
Group nobody

To:

User apache
Group apache

And then service httpd restart and now all of those 'nobody' processes are being run by apache, and svn import works!

Another solution that would probably work, but I didn't test it, is to go to your repo and run chgrp -R svn ./* so all of the files in the repo have the svn group, and then add the user nobody to the svn group (usermod -g svn nobody). You can also add any other users to the group, if you want (probably more useful is you are running an svnserve svn server, rather than through apache).

I'm not sure why the apache config was set to run as nobody, it seems to be the default on CentOS servers from GoDaddy (which is the server I'm running on)

Leave these directives in:

client
dev tun
tun-mtu 1500
remote vpn.riseup.net
auth-user-pass
ca RiseupCA.pem
redirect-gateway
verb 4

Remove these:

<ca>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[OMITTED]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</ca>