October 8, 2005
CVS over SSH
Today I sat down to finish up my home office setup by configuring cvs over ssh. I wanted to do this so I could maintain some source control over a few of the projects I have been working on both professionaly and the hobby work I do. I have messed with the cvs pserver in the past for source control on a kiosk project I did while working for a small processing company in Carrollton Texas. The setup there used cvs a pam patch to authenticate against a domain controller using samba’s winbind. I believe it only took me two days to get this setup running. And I was slightly familiar with how the process worked. Between the compilation dependencies and setup however it made me want to pull all my hair out. One thing that I always disliked about the final setup was it was insecure.
I have personally been avoiding cvs for my own use because I simnply did not want to deal with it ever again. Once I began working on the mod_video project, (Yes I’m still working on some stuff), I noticed how well wincvs integrated with the sourceforge cvs repo. This prompted me to lookinto implimenting it on my own server. Today I found I had some free time I thoguht I would dedicate to this project. I set asside the rest of the night and tomorrow to complete this task. Less than 1 hour later I had all my projects entered into cvs and commented as needed. I had no idea how easy it would be to setup a secure cvs environment if you already had cvs and ssh installed. Apparently the pserver is no longer used or needed in this config. It just uses, I’m guessing, various transport protocols in openssh to perform the required operations.
Now that I know this I can say there is no reason to ever be without source control or to ever use it insecurly again. I’m a believer in CVS and I will continue to use it until something better slaps me upside the head.