Setting up repository - very odd - help!

[Ralph Mack]

Hello all,

I finally got on broadband, so I picked up a cheap PC to use as my Linux
server,
and started setting up services on it, including setting up CVS for
:pserver:
access from my Win2000 box.

At first things were going great. I got it set up and was able to login from
my Windows 2000 box and use the CVS command line and WinCVS on Win2000 to
import all of my projects into the repository.

I look and everything is there - only the files were set with my personal
group instead of the "cvs" group and they had a username of "ralph" rather
than "root". Strange...

Then I say to myself "OK, now let's get these files back out so I can work
on them."
I do a cvs checkout and I get:

cvs server: cannot open /root/.cvsignore: Permission denied
cvs [server aborted]: can't chdir(/root): Permission denied

OK, now this really doesn't seem right. Any clues?
My config is:

SystemAuth=no
PreservePermissions=no
TopLevelAdmin=no

My passwd has ralph and anonymous with working passwords.

I don't want to loosen the permissions on root for obvious reasons.
Where else can I look? It is almost as if cvs is not operating as root.
Is there some other bit I need to set? (I know I need to tighten up my
CVSROOT before I open up 2401 on my firewall so I can get at my sources
from the office. Everything I've done so far is on my local LAN.)

drwxrwxr-x    3 root     cvs          4096 May 10 01:59 CVSROOT
drwxrwxr-x    3 ralph    cvs          4096 May  9 02:17 CharMaster
drwxrwxr-x    5 anonymou cvs          4096 May  9 03:34 Desktop
drwxrwxr-x    2 ralph    cvs          4096 May  9 02:13 LANSwap
drwxrwxr-x    2 ralph    cvs          4096 May  9 02:24 OrderOfBattle
drwxrwxr-x    2 ralph    cvs          4096 May 10 01:48 OrderOfBattle-PPC

Oh - yeah - versions - server is RedHat 6.2 (CVS 1.0.7) and client is
1.10. (I'll go to 1.11 when I upgrade my RedHat box to 7.1.)

Thanks,

Ralph A. Mack