I am getting a meaningless error message from SVN:Anyone know what that really means?

I've encountered it before, and I've seen a variety of reasons

• Hostname of your local machine not being resolved (try adding to hosts file of the SVN server)
• Firewall issue(s)
• Negotiation issues (try changing from "file://" to "svn+ssh://")

Can't offer more, not knowing what version/distro of Linux the server is running, or anything that you've seen in the logs on either the client or the host, or how you're trying to connect.

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After doing strace, I noted it was looking for the hostname a lot. Adding that to /etc/hosts ... which should have been there, but no other apps complained ... and SVN runs OK, now. This could have been better:

svn: Unable to resolve IP address for client host: some-host-name

Glad it got you going. And I agree, but sometimes errors like that hang around because of the inner-workings of the code. Sometimes the program does things it shouldn't be ABLE to do, and there's a generic message that handles those errors.

For HP Printers, there is a message that comes up when the printer returns error codes that shouldn't exist together. Things like the printer getting a "paper-empty" message on tray 2...when there isn't a tray 2 attached. The "Printer on fire" message isn't seen often...but is in the code (at least it used to be).

I think those older laser printers were just unable to distinguish between printer on fire and paper on fire.