Savannah Administration - News: New CVS access methods

New CVS access methods

Item posted by Loïc Dachary <loic> on Wed 12 Dec 2001 01:32:42 PM UTC.

The CVS server was compiled to allow Kerberos authentication. Assuming a developer has a kerberos account on gnu.org, she can now use the :gserver: method instead of CVS over ssh. This can only be used by GNU volunteers. Savannah itself does not provide a mean to get a kerberos account on gnu.org. In addition, for people living behind a fascist firewall, the port 443 (https) can be used to access the CVS tree with the :pserver: or :gserver: methods.

The CVS information page for each project was updated to explain the syntax to use. GSSAPI (named :gserver: on the command line) has essentially the same syntax as CVS over ssh:

cvs -d :gserver:user@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/project co module

The advantage of using :gserver: is that you don't need to register the ssh public key thru the web interface. Although quite rare, some people are more confortable with kerberos than with ssh and this facility is meant to help them.

If a firewall blocks the access to the port used by :gserver: and :pserver: (2401), one can instead use the 443 port (https) which is usually open so that people can browse the web using https. The default port may be modified in the following way:

cvs -d :pserver:user@subversions.gnu.org:443/cvsroot/project co module

The :gserver: access method and the use of the 443 port were indeed impemented on subversions.gnu.org long ago. Some months ago they stopped working and nobody cared to fix them. Since they are only used by a few people, the probability for these access methods to stop working properly in the future is not null. If you care about these access method and want them to work forever, the best solution is to help maintaining them.