2.9.2 Connecting with rsh or ssh

CVS may use the ‘ssh’ protocol to perform these operations, so the remote user host needs to have a either an agent like ssh-agent to hold credentials or a .shosts file which grants access to the local user. Note that the program that CVS uses for this purpose may be specified using the --with-ssh flag to configure.

CVS uses the ‘rsh’ protocol to perform these operations, so the remote user host needs to have a .rhosts file which grants access to the local user. Note that the program that CVS uses for this purpose may be specified using the --with-rsh flag to configure.

For example, suppose you are the user ‘mozart’ on the local machine ‘toe.example.com’, and the server machine is ‘faun.example.org’. On faun, put the following line into the file .rhosts in ‘bach’’s home directory:

toe.example.com  mozart

Then test that ‘rsh’ is working with

rsh -l bach faun.example.org 'echo $PATH'

To test that ‘ssh’ is working use

ssh -l bach faun.example.org 'echo $PATH'

Next you have to make sure that rsh will be able to find the server. Make sure that the path which rsh printed in the above example includes the directory containing a program named cvs which is the server. You need to set the path in .bashrc, .cshrc, etc., not .login or .profile. Alternately, you can set the environment variable CVS_SERVER on the client machine to the filename of the server you want to use, for example /usr/local/bin/cvs-1.6.

There is no need to edit inetd.conf or start a CVS server daemon.

There are three access methods that you use in CVSROOT for rsh or ssh. :server: specifies an internal rsh client, which is supported only by some CVS ports. :extssh: specifies an external ssh program. By default this is ssh (unless otherwise specified by the --with-ssh flag to configure) but you may set the CVS_SSH environment variable to invoke another program or wrapper script. :ext: specifies an external rsh program. By default this is rsh (unless otherwise specified by the --with-rsh flag to configure) but you may set the CVS_RSH environment variable to invoke another program which can access the remote server (for example, remsh on HP-UX 9 because rsh is something different). It must be a program which can transmit data to and from the server without modifying it; for example the Windows NT rsh is not suitable since it by default translates between CRLF and LF. The OS/2 CVS port has a hack to pass ‘-b’ to rsh to get around this, but since this could potentially cause problems for programs other than the standard rsh, it may change in the future. If you set CVS_RSH to SSH or some other rsh replacement, the instructions in the rest of this section concerning .rhosts and so on are likely to be inapplicable; consult the documentation for your rsh replacement.

Continuing our example, supposing you want to access the module foo in the repository /usr/local/cvsroot/, on machine faun.example.org, you are ready to go:

cvs -d :ext:bach@faun.example.org:/usr/local/cvsroot checkout foo

(The bach@ can be omitted if the username is the same on both the local and remote hosts.)