problem using TortoiseCVS remotely, local cvs access works fine

[wild98]

Hi all,

My workplace uses cvs, and I'm stumped trying to set something up. In a
nutshell, we have a new linux box set up on a bandwidth feed somewhere
across the country, and we're trying to get remote CVS access working
on the box. Currently, if we SSH into the machine, we can use CVS from
the command line just fine:

address@hidden /home/iand/cvswork/myproject]$ cvs status cgi-bin
cvs status: Examining cgi-bin
cvs status: Examining cgi-bin/test
===================================================================
File: test.cgi          Status: Up-to-date

   Working revision:    1.1.1.1 Thu Dec 14 01:52:28 2006
   Repository revision: 1.1.1.1
/home/cvs/myproject/cgi-bin/test/test.cgi,v
   Sticky Tag:          (none)
   Sticky Date:         (none)
   Sticky Options:      (none)

address@hidden /home/iand/cvswork/myproject]$ _


Unfortunately, until our IT guy gets our VPN access to this server
finished, they need us to access this CVS repository remotely, and
therein lies the problem. I'm using PuTTY to build a tunnel to port
2401 from my local system to the remote system. In Windows, I've
created a folder called "myproject" to coincide with the project I'm
trying to check out on my workstation. I right-click on the folder,
click on "CVS Checkout..." and use the following CVSROOT string to try
to connect:

:pserver:address@hidden:2401/home/cvs

(Note again that I'm using 127.0.0.1 because I'm using putty to forward
port 2401 via SSH to the remote system.)

However, upon submission to try to check-out that project, TortoiseCVS
fails with:

----------------------
In C:\code\test\myproject: "C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS\cvs.exe"
"checkout" "-P" "myproject"
CVSROOT=:pserver:address@hidden:2401/home/cvs

cvs [checkout aborted]: /home/cvs: no such repository

Error, CVS operation failed
----------------------

... and when TortoiseCVS fails like this, we can see failure messages
in /var/log/messages on the remote linux box:

Jan  2 19:45:24 remotebox.com cvs: login refused for /home/cvs
Jan  2 19:45:50 remotebox.com cvs: login refused for /home/cvs

... yet working directly on the Linux box through an SSH shell works
just fine as mentioned earlier in this message.

After reading through some other messages in this newsgroup and others,
I decided I'd try the cvs.exe route, opened a command prompt window,
and tried a log procedure:


C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS>cvs
-d:pserver:address@hidden:2401/home/cvs login
Logging in to :pserver:address@hidden:2401:/home/cvs
CVS Password: (typed in 'mypassword' here and hit Enter)
cvs [login aborted]: /home/cvs: no such repository


So I'm stumped. CVS is obviously running on the machine and answering
requests because we can use CVS on the linux box itself. But when we
try to connect to the system using an SSH tunnel, it fails.

Any ideas on steps I can take to work through this? I've run out of
ideas and not finding any new information through Google searches that
get me any closer.

xinetd is running, cvs responds to it just fine. Our current firewall
as well as the firewall at the remote site will not allow traffic on
port 2401 which is why we're setting up the VPN. Until then though
(could be a week or two), we need to use PuTTY to create the SSH tunnel
for us.

Thanks for any help,
ian