RE: Help with new users in CVS.

[Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden
[mailto:info-
> address@hidden On Behalf Of Mike
> Glasspool
> Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 14:50
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Help with new users in CVS.
> 
> *My apologies if this is posted twice.

Five times, but who is counting? 
In the future you may want to check the message headers for the archive
URL, and use that to check (a few hours after sending) to see if the
list has seen it yet.
And Just for the sake of stating it, make sure the replies to this go
the list, and not _just_ to me (or any other specific list member).


> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I am relatively new to working with CVS. Someone else set up our CVS
> system in a way I don't really like.
> 
> We have multiple cvs usernames, all pointing to one system user that
> has access to our entire repository.
> 
> Recently we have hired a contractor - wanting to partition that users
> access, I set up a system group called:
> 
> moddev
> 
> I made our existing system user a member of this group so that
existing
> permissions for full time developers can be maintained, I then did a
> change group on all the files and folders under the module.
> 
> This all worked.
> 
> Now I added a new system user call modcont (module contractor) and
made
> it a member of the moddev group.
> 

Ok, at this point I started getting concerned with 
a) Which OS (or OS type) is your server on
        * Unix (and which brand can sometimes be helpful)
        * Windows (and which brand can sometimes be helpful)
        * cygwin
        * Other
b) Yours and my understanding of groups on the OS where your server is.
   IIRC on Unix you can not stack groups, i.e., a group can not be a
member of another group.
c) Which exact version of CVS you are running on the server.
   IIRC if you run `cvs version` and|or `cvs --version` one of those
commands should spit out two version lines, one for the client and one
for the server.  Having this knowledge will help myself or others to
give you good suggestions.
d) Are you also the admin of the machine? (if so, and if you don't
already have specific training in that OS, you may want to look at using
some company training time to get those certs, which often help when
setting up and tweaking tools like CVS.)


> I set up a new CVS user with the users username in the
> $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/passwd file. Now when I try to checkout, I get
"setgid
> failed: Operation not permitted". If I used WinCVS to connect, I get
> the same message when I try to login.
> 

Did you create the new user both at the system level (/etc/passwd) and
at the cvs level ($CVSROOT/CVSROOT/passwd)?

> The system is using pserver, and if I log in to the machine using the
> modcont system user, I can get in and it works fine.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Read/search the list archives, and you may want to switch (after
appropriate consideration and management approval) all users from
pserver to one of the other connection methods if you are concerned
about security/the ability to audit.  And to each user having a system
login vs having all users using cvs auth to a single system user.

> 
> Thanks!

Assuming Unix based standard CVS, Things you may want to get and have on
hand:
The manual (also called the cederqvist):
http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/
or
get an appropriate copy of cederqvist-*  from ftp.gnu.org such as
http://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/stable/1.11.23/

cvs2cl a tool for creating change logs which show how things were
checked in as groups:
http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/
    or the python version of it cvs2cl.py that is included in CVSNT
(Which IIRC is included in WinCVS)

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