Bug 7235

Summary:	CVS pserver refuses to work with RedHat 6.1
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	martin
Component:	cvs	Assignee:	Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-11-22 21:43:59 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description martin 1999-11-22 21:37:12 UTC

I am writing this to bug-cvs as well as bugzilla, as I do not wnow who's
actually concerned. Also, it might be an inetd bug rather than a CVS bug.
If so, I excuse myself for bothering anybody.

RedHat 6.1, cvs version 1.10-6.

This bug is actually very closely related to RH 6.1 #5893, which was
resolved with WONTFIX status. However #5893 applies only if pserver
is run as root. I wanted to run cvs pserver as a normal user anyway.
However, whenever a different user (i.e. not the one pserver is running as)
tries to do any CVS operation, this is the outcome:

$ cvs checkout Madmacs
setuid failed: Operation not permitted
cvs [checkout aborted]: authorization failed: server whisky rejected access

The line in inetd.conf reads:
cvspserver stream tcp nowait martin /usr/bin/cvs cvs \
--allow-root=/data/cvs pserver

"martin" is the user owning the repository /data/cvs.

If "martin" in inetd.conf is replaced by "root", the behaviour is
as described in bug #5893:
$ cvs checkout Madmacs
cvs server: cannot open /root/.cvsignore: Permission denied
cvs [server aborted]: can't chdir(/root): Permission denied

The same configuration (with user "martin") works perfectly on RedHat 5.2
(cvs 1.10-2), which is my current workaround.

Comment 1 Jim Kingdon 1999-11-22 21:43:59 UTC

You can specify a non-root user but you need to set up CVSROOT/passwd as
described at http://www.cyclic.com/cvs/unoff-nonroot.txt