I've decided to move our subversion repository to a new server. Put up a fresh install of CentOS 5.2 x32, updated and installed subversion on it.

Decided to set it up using svnserve with sasl, as 1.5 supports that. Following the SVN Book, I set up my svnserve.conf file as follows

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1[general]
2anon-access = none
3auth-access = write
4realm = isf
5[sasl]
6use-sasl = true
7min-encryption = 128
8max-encryption = 256

I had set up the /etc/sasl/svn.conf file as follows

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1pwcheck_method: auxprop
2auxprop_plugin: sasldb
3sasldb_path: /svn/sassl
4mech_list: DIGEST-MD5

Unfortunately, I kept getting the "Could not obtain the list of SASL mechanisms" error in TortoiseSVN and other clients. Nobody seemed to be able to help, until I finally figured it out - the DIGEST-MD5 plugin wasn't installed for cyrus by default on CentOS 5.2. All I had to do was run the following command and everything started working.

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1yum install cyrus-sasl-md5