Re: CVS on NT

[david]

> What are the pros and cons of running a CVS server on NT ?
> 
> We have mainly Windows CVS clients.
>
As opposed to the alternative of running a server on Linux or
*BSD?

I'd rather not get into OS wars, but Linux is more often reported
as stable and reliable than NT, and certainly takes fewer machine
resources of its own.  This may or may not be a concern.  While
you're likely more familiar with NT than Linux, it's easy to set
up a Linux box running CVS, so that's probably not an important
concern.

I'm not an expert on CVSNT (see http://www.cvsnt.org, I believe),
but AFAIK it supports pserver and ntserver modes.  The pserver
mode does not do any sort of reliable user authentication, and
should not be used except by trusted people over secure communication
lines.  The ntserver mode is like pserver, but uses NT authentication,
which probably means you can't use it if you have any non-MS clients
(and you said you had "mainly" MS Windows clients).  In addition,
I saw a comment about not wanting to expose NT authentication to
the Internet; I don't know how applicable that would be.

CVSNT also seems to be more interested in making changes to the server,
whereas the CVS developers seem to think that CVS is a mature product,
and needs only minor improvements.  If you like the newer CVSNT
features, this is a point in its favor; if not, I would imagine that
CVS is more stable and hence more reliable.

If you're running some Unix CVS clients, or have any clients outside
a secure firewall, I'd recommend a Linux CVS server.  Other than
that, look at cvsnt.org and see what they have to offer.  (They
have their own mailing list; you might ask the same question there.)
 
David H. Thornley                        | If you want my opinion, ask.
address@hidden                       | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-