Failing commits that appear to succeed

[Jake Briggs]

Hi All

I have a situation with a developer who has lost a small amount of work. 
The developer assures me that the "cvs commit" appeared to succeed, 
producing no errors. As far as the cvs server is concerned, it didn't 
get any successful commits, the loginfo file emails successful commits 
to a list of people and none were sent.
We use the :ext: method with ssh, I see regular connections to the 
server from the developers machine, so I know the developer got their 
password right when trying to commit!

My question are :
Does this scenario seem familiar to anyone? If so, what was the problem?
How does one log failed commit attempts? The loginfo appears to only be 
run when a commit succeeds.
What other things could/should I be logging, to find the cause of the 
problem I have detailed, bearing in mind that I am not completely 
convinced that the cvs server is to blame :)

Jake