Recently, I tried to access a local in-house SVN on our server, and received the following error message - regardless of what action I tried (checkout, update, ...):
I've tried restarting the inetd on the SVN server, but that didn't help.svn: Malformed network data
[SOLUTION]
The actual repository files were stored on an external harddisk (USB) - and it had been de-attached, so svnserve pointed to a non-existing repository folder.
So, if you run into that error on your own server, check if that the repository data is locally accessible on that machine
