Suggestion: amendments to the Cederqvist manual

[Don Schneider]

I am not a subscriber to this email list, so please accept my 
apologies if this has been well covered already or is the wrong 
forum.  Also, please include me specifically if any follow up from me 
is needed or desired.

The Cederqvist CVS manual at 
http://cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs_2.html#SEC28 describes how to set 
up CVS for use with rsh.  I found one error of omission, would like 
to suggest a minor change in the example, and believe a new section 
is needed.

First: to get rsh to work (at least on my Linux-Mandrake), it is 
necessary to set the permissions of the .rhosts file to user 
read/write ("chmod 600 .rhosts").  The manual goes into great detail 
about how to configure a system to use rsh, but does not mention this.

Second: I found the perspective of the rsh example inverted:

"For example, suppose you are the user `mozart' on the local machine 
`toe.example.com', and the server machine is `faun.example.org'."

I was configuring a machine to act as a CVS server; in my mind, that 
is the local machine, and the people accessing it are remote.  The 
obscurity of the names used in the example are ambiguous, which makes 
the example less accessible.   Thus, I propose the example should 
read:

"For example, suppose you are the user `remote_user' on the machine 
`remote.example.com', and the user 'local_cvs_user' has  CVS 
permissions on the server machine `cvsserver.example.org'."

(The body of the example would need to be updated to correspond to 
the new nomenclature as well.)

Finally: I believe the standard mechanism for setting up a secure CVS 
server currently is to use ssh rather than rsh (since every document 
on security I have seen cites disabling rsh and its brethren as one 
of the very first steps towards security).  The CVS manual is very 
brief in its description of how to use ssh ("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"). 
This should be more complete.

Thank you for your time.