permission problem with sandbox on NFS mounted directory

[Kenneth Dombrowski]

Hi, 

I've been researching a problem that manifests itself as : 

address@hidden : cvs -d address@hidden:/homes/mice/repository co mice-admin
cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot get working directory: Permission denied

truss output: 

pathconf(".", _PC_PATH_MAX)                     = 1024
stat64("./", 0xFFBEF768)                        = 0
stat64("/", 0xFFBEF6D0)                         = 0
open64("./../", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY)              = 3
fcntl(3, F_SETFD, 0x00000001)                   = 0
fstat64(3, 0xFFBEECE8)                          = 0
fstat64(3, 0xFFBEF768)                          = 0
getdents64(3, 0x000AF4E0, 1048)                 = 144
close(3)                                        = 0
open64("./../../", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY)           = 3
fcntl(3, F_SETFD, 0x00000001)                   = 0
fstat64(3, 0xFFBEECE8)                          = 0
fstat64(3, 0xFFBEF768)                          = 0
getdents64(3, 0x000AF4E0, 1048)                 = 944
close(3)                                        = 0
open64("./../../../", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY)        Err#13 EACCES
cvswrite(2, " c v s", 3)                                = 3
 write(2, "  ", 1)                              = 1
[write(2, " [", 1)                              = 1
checkoutwrite(2, " c h e c k o u t", 8)                 = 8
 aborted]write(2, "   a b o r t e d ]", 9)              = 9
: write(2, " :  ", 2)                           = 2
cannot get working directorywrite(2, " c a n n o t   g e t   w".., 28)  = 28
: write(2, " :  ", 2)                           = 2
Permission deniedwrite(2, " P e r m i s s i o n   d".., 17)     = 17

and indeed, 

address@hidden : ls -l ./../../../
ls: ./../../..: Permission denied

this is due to the NFS mounts my home directory lives on: 

address@hidden : ls -ld /home/kenneth /home
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root     root          512 Sep 21 12:59 /home
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           15 Sep 21 12:59 /home/kenneth -> 
/u/tech/kenneth
address@hidden : ls -ld /u/tech/kenneth /u/tech /u
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root     root          512 Sep 21 10:48 /u
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           17 Sep 20 10:56 /u/tech -> 
/n/mineral/u/tech
drwxr-xr-x  13 kenneth  student      4096 Jun 22 16:54 /u/tech/kenneth
address@hidden : ls -ld /n/mineral/u/tech /n/mineral/u /n/mineral /n
dr-xr-xr-x  14 root     root          512 Sep 21 04:50 /n
dr-xr-xr-x   3 root     root          512 Jan  6  2006 /n/mineral
dr-xr-xr-x   8 root     root          512 Sep 21 10:45 /n/mineral/u
drwxr-x--x  29 root     root         4096 Aug  8 16:59 /n/mineral/u/tech

now, I'm kind of confused.  I know it's more of a c question, but why
must every directory above cwd be readable, so long as it's traversable? 

and finally, my cvs question: is such an environment simply broken for
cvs?  I find it hard to believe I'm the first person in the CS dept. to
notice that we can't use cvs on this cluster 

Thanks! 
kennethd 

Oh: cvs client is 1.11.17 on solaris 8