[savannah-help-public] [sr #109340] Checking for new files with "cvs -qn update" always times out

[Bob Proulx]

Update of sr #109340 (project administration):

             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

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Follow-up Comment #9:

It looks like you have located the problem. That being that it is trying to
use 'rsh' instead of 'ssh'. Good. I do not know why you would have one
directory trying to incorrectly use rsh while another is correctly using ssh.
That makes no sense to me.

Some background may be useful. In the beginning was the Berkey 'r'commands
rlogin, rsh, rcp, and some lessor known commands such as ruptime and rwho.
This was during the time when only telnet and ftp were otherwise in use. When
CVS came along it used rsh. The net was a friendly place then. Encryption in
the US was considered a munition and regulated.

ssh came later. Now using rsh seems crazy. Everyone and all programs should be
using ssh whenever they would have used rsh back a few decades ago. On my
Debian system /usr/bin/rsh is a symlink alternative pointing to ssh.

update-alternatives --display rsh

Perhaps you have something else installed and it is being pointed to by rsh?

However your transport specified in your CVS/Root file was "extssh" which is
documented as:

   In the Debian and MirBSD versions of CVS, you can also specify
':extssh:' to force use of the Secure Shell, or ':ext=prog:' or
':ext=/path/to/prog:' to specify the remote shell to use without needing
to touch the 'CVS_RSH' environment variable.

I looked at that specifically but it says it forces use of ssh. Therefore if
your transport is extssh then I think your client should be using ssh.  But
apparently not.  Why is something you will need to track down on your system.
With both extssh and with rsh being a symlink to ssh there are multiple things
all configuring that any use of rsh will default to ssh. Therefore it makes no
sense that you would have actually had rsh running for one of the
directories.

You looked at all of your CVS/Root files and said they were all identical. 
This really is confusing.  Because if one directory were doing one thing and
another directory were doing another thing then I would expect that one of
them would need to be different.

And with this I am offline for the night because it is very, very late here.
Since we have the answer to the problem, and a workaround for you of setting
CVS_RSH=ssh if nothing else, I am going to go ahead and close the ticket for
housekeeping. But if you learn anything please update the ticket with the
information so that we can learn something here too.




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