Posted by Jim at November 21st, 2006

I don’t know if this happens to other people, but personally it seems like the most frustrating problems I’ve faced in programming/system administration have been caused by myself.

For example, a few nights ago I set up a cvs repository. While setting it up was no problem, I found it absolutely impossible to access the CVS repository remotely. For some reason I was getting errors along the lines “No connection:I/O Error:blah-blah-blah:no such repository…”

This was rather irritating as I knew for a fact that there was such a repository.

I then spent a great deal of time experimenting with the various ways I could configure CVS on a CVS client, but no matter what I did, the client never connected.

I also checked out the inetd.conf file. “inetd” for those of you who don’t know is the unix daemon used to control connections from outside computers to yours. In the case of CVS, you’re supposed to enable a line that allows the particular CVS protocol that you’re using. Part of this line describes the path to the CVS repository. Get it wrong and you risk allowing people access to your machine.

I got it wrong.

Bearing in mind that the computer was on my home network, this was not a security problem. Nonetheless it took me a few days to notice this despite checking the file several times.

Grr…