I’m a big beneficiary of other people’s problems.

I’ve solved many technical mysteries by looking through the gothic horror stories of other people’s grisly disasters. And it could never have been possible if folks hadn’t posted their problems online, and received a reply containing the silver bullet to put in their gun and fire into the werewolf’s chest. So this time I thought I’d give back, just a tiny bit. I had an issue with my subversion repository locking up. I would get this error:
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

whether I used the svn commandline interface or tortoise. Fortunately this post exists. Thank you AdamGreenfield.

The trick is - copying verbatim from Adam:
-bash-3.00$ cp -raf repos repos.orig
-bash-3.00$ db_recover -h repos/db/
-bash-3.00$ svnadmin verify ./repos/

Basically db_recover unlocks the db which is behind svn. After I did this everything worked fine.