Trouble making a connection to a CVS server

This section concerns what to do if you are having trouble making a connection to a cvsnt server. If you are running the cvsnt command line client running on Windows, first upgrade the client to cvsnt 1.9.12 or later. The error reporting in earlier versions provided much less information about what the problem was. If the client is non-Windows, cvsnt 1.9 should be fine.

If the error messages are not sufficient to track down the problem, the next steps depend largely on which access method you are using.

:ext:

Try running the ssh program from the command line. For example: "ssh servername cvs -v" should print cvsnt version information. If this doesn't work, you need to fix it before you can worry about cvsnt problems.

:server:

You don't need a command line rsh program to use this access method, but if you have an rsh program around, it may be useful as a debugging tool. Follow the directions given for :ext:.

:pserver:

Errors along the lines of "connection refused" typically indicate that cvsmanager isn't even listening for connections on port 2401 whereas errors like "connection reset by peer" or "recv() from server: EOF" typically indicate that cvsmanager is listening for connections but is unable to start cvsnt . Another less common problem is invisible control characters that your editor "helpfully" added without you noticing.

One good debugging tool is to "telnet servername 2401". After connecting, send any text (for example "foo" followed by return). If cvsnt is working correctly, it will respond with

cvs [authserver aborted]: bad auth protocol start: foo

If it fails to work at all, then make sure cvsmanager is working right.

On AIX systems, the system will often have its own program trying to use port 2401. This is AIX's problem in the sense that port 2401 is registered for use with cvsnt. I hear that there is an AIX patch available to address this problem.

:gserver:

If you cannot connect using gserver, ensure that your kerberos installation is correctly configured. You will need a working PAM configuraiton if your system uses that, and nsswitch.conf may need to be configured to recognise kerberos users.

Kerberos is rather difficult to configure, and it is beyond the scope of this manual. There are many resources on the internet to help you with this.