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.
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