Paul’s jabber

I just installed subversion on my machine at home. Being my usual clumsy self, I set the path to the svnserve.exe incorrectly when installing the subversion windows service and therefore the service failed to start when running the following command at the command prompt:

net start <service name>

In this case:

net start SVNService

The one way to resolve such an issue would have been for me to simply delete the service by running the following command:

sc delete <service name>

In this case:

sc delete SVNService

and then recreating/reinstalling the subversion service by running:

sc create <service name>

In this case (http://www.stanford.edu/~bsuter/subversion-setup-guide/):

sc create “SVNService” binpath= “C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnserve –service -r C:\svn-repos” displayname= “SVNService” depend= Tcpip start= auto

The above approach would have required a reboot and so instead I opted for a different route by finding the service in the registry and correcting its image path. Fortunately this did not require a reboot. I did this as follows:

1. Hit the Windows + R key to get the “Run” dialog box.
2. Type regedt32 or regedit to open the Registry Editor.
3. Underneath the following registry key you should find the key of the service you wish to modify. In this case it was the SVNService that I created:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

4. Within your service’s key you will find the string value “ImagePath”, which in this case should point to my svnserve.exe with the appropriate switch specifying the path to my repository i.e. C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnserve –service -r C:\svn-repos\