cvs server: could not open output file: Permission denied, subsidiary diff failed

[Tom Andersen]

CVS info readers,

I thought that this may be of value to people with the same problem as we
had on our CVS install. The solution which I eventually found was not at all
easy to find. Posting it here as well as where I got it from (
address@hidden) should help more search engines see it.

--Tom



Ingmar Bitter writes:
>
> cvs server: could not open output file: Permission denied
> cvs server: subsidiary diff failed

As the message indicates, this is a server problem, not a client
problem.  It appears that you do not have write permission in the
server's temp directory.  Perhaps someone changed the permissions on the
directory or change which directory is being used.

-Larry Jones

Thanks, we tracked it down:
cvs ci/co use /tmp for temporary file, but the merge uses /var/tmp and that
one had the permissions changed.

-Ingmar

So I found that var/tmp needed to have a chmod done on it to allow the users
coming in to read/write to it. It had been changed during an update to the
server. 

--Tom
-- 
Tom Andersen
address@hidden
http://www.space.com/starrynight