There are many postings across the internet from people who are have problems with subversion repositories reporting PROPFIND 403 errors. There are three basic problems that can cause this error:
- directory permissions don’t match the user that Apache runs under.
- the “authz” config file has a problem with it: misconfiguration, bad paths, etc.
- mod_evasive is catching multiple and fast HTTP calls by your subversion client and returning the 403 error.