Appendix E. Troubleshooting

This is a generic response when trying to connect to a pserver server which chooses not to provide a specific reason for denying authorization. Check that the username and password specified are correct and that the CVSROOT specified is allowed by /etc/cvsnt/PServer. See the section called “Direct connection with password authentication”.

The exact format of this message may vary depending on your system. It indicates a bug in cvsnt, which can be handled as described in Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual.

This message indicates that you removed a file, and someone else modified it. To resolve the conflict, first run cvs add file. If desired, look at the other party's modification to decide whether you still want to remove it. If you don't want to remove it, stop here. If you do want to remove it, proceed with cvs remove file and commit your removal.

Operation not permitted

This message has been happening in a non-reproducible, occasional way when we run the client/server testsuite, both on Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 and 4.1. We haven't been able to figure out what causes it, nor is it known whether it is specific to linux (or even to this particular machine!). If the problem does occur on other unices, Operation not permitted would be likely to read Not owner or whatever the system in question uses for the unix EPERM error. If you have any information to add, please let us know as described in Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual. If you experience this error while using cvsnt, retrying the operation which produced it should work fine.

The obvious cause for this message (especially for non-client/server cvsnt) is that the cvsnt root is, for example, /usr/local/cvsroot and you try to check out files when you are in a subdirectory, such as /usr/local/cvsroot/test. However, there is a more subtle cause, which is that the temporary directory on the server is set to a subdirectory of the root (which is also not allowed). If this is the problem, set the temporary directory to somewhere else, for example /var/tmp; see TMPDIR in Appendix C, All environment variables which affect CVS, for how to set the temporary directory.

This generally indicates a cvsnt internal error, and can be handled as with other cvsnt bugs (Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual). Usually there is a workaround--the exact nature of which would depend on the situation but which hopefully could be figured out.

This message is harmless. Provided it is not accompanied by other errors, the operation has completed successfully. This message should not occur with current versions of cvsnt, but it is documented here for the benefit of cvsnt 1.9 and older.

This message has been reported as intermittently happening with cvsnt 1.9 on Solaris 2.5. The cause is unknown; if you know more about what causes it, let us know as described in Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual.

This, unfortunately, is a rather nonspecific error message which cvsnt 1.9 will print if you are running the cvsnt client and it is having trouble connecting to the server. Current versions of cvsnt should print a much more specific error message. If you get this message when you didn't mean to run the client at all, you probably forgot to specify :local:, as described in Chapter 2, The Repository.

cvsnt 1.9 and older will print this message when trying to check in a binary file if rcs is not correctly installed. Re-read the instructions that came with your rcs distribution and the install file in the cvsnt distribution. Alternately, upgrade to a current version of cvsnt, which checks in files itself rather than via rcs.

With cvsnt 1.9, this can mean that the co program (part of rcs) returned a failure. It should be preceded by another error message, however it has been observed without another error message and the cause is not well-understood. With the current version of cvsnt, which does not run co, if this message occurs without another error message, it is definitely a cvsnt bug (Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual).

This means that you need to set the environment variables that cvsnt uses to locate your home directory. See the discussion of HOME, HOMEDRIVE, and HOMEPATH in Appendix C, All environment variables which affect CVS.

cvsnt 1.9 and older will print this message if there was a problem finding the rcsmerge program. Make sure that it is in your PATH, or upgrade to a current version of cvsnt, which does not require an external rcsmerge program.

This means that there was a problem finding the patch program. Make sure that it is in your PATH. Note that despite appearances the message is not referring to whether it can find file. If both the client and the server are running a current version of cvsnt, then there is no need for an external patch program and you should not see this message. But if either client or server is running cvsnt 1.9, then you need patch.

This means that for whatever reason the client was unable to apply a patch that the server sent. The message is nothing to be concerned about, because inability to apply the patch only slows things down and has no effect on what cvsnt does.

There is a known bug in the server for CVS 1.9.18 and older which can cause this. For me, this was reproducible if I used the -t global option. It was fixed by Andy Piper's 14 Nov 1997 change to src/filesubr.c, if anyone is curious. If you see the message, you probably can just retry the operation which failed, or if you have discovered information concerning its cause, please let us know as described in Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual.

The most common cause for this message is if you are using an external rsh program and it exited with an error. In this case the rsh program should have printed a message, which will appear before the above message. For more information on setting up a cvsnt client and server, see the section called “Remote repositories”.

This means that there is a syntax error in the given rcs file. Note that this might be true even if rcs can read the file OK; cvsnt does more error checking of errors in the rcs file. That is why you may see this message when upgrading from CVS 1.9 to CVS 1.10. The likely cause for the original corruption is hardware, the operating system, or the like. Of course, if you find a case in which cvsnt seems to corrupting the file, by all means report it, (Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual). There are quite a few variations of this error message, depending on exactly where in the rcs file cvsnt finds the syntax error.

This means that your repository is set up for a version of cvsnt prior to cvsnt 1.8. When using cvsnt 1.8 or later, the above message will be preceded by

cvs commit: Rebuilding administrative file database

If you see both messages, the database is being rebuilt twice, which is unnecessary but harmless. If you wish to avoid the duplication, and you have no versions of cvsnt 1.7 or earlier in use, remove -i mkmodules every place it appears in your modules file. For more information on the modules file, see the section called “The modules file”.

Typically this can happen if you created an rcs file with your username set to empty. cvsnt will, bogusly, create an illegal rcs file with no value for the author field. The solution is to make sure your username is set to a non-empty value and re-create the rcs file.

This message means that cvsnt isn't familiar with the tag tag. Usually this means that you have mistyped a tag name; however there are (relatively obscure) cases in which cvsnt will require you to try a few other cvsnt commands involving that tag, before you find one which will cause cvsnt to update the val-tags file; see discussion of val-tags in the section called “File permissions”. You only need to worry about this once for a given tag; when a tag is listed in val-tags, it stays there. Note that using -f to not require tag matches does not override this check; see the section called “Common command options”.

This typically means that there is a directory named cvsnt but it does not contain the administrative files which cvsnt puts in a CVS directory. If the problem is that you created a CVS directory via some mechanism other than cvsnt, then the answer is simple, use a name other than cvsnt. If not, it indicates a cvsnt bug (Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual).

This message will be followed by a usage message for rcs. It means that you have an old version of rcs (probably supplied with your operating system), as well as an old version of cvsnt. CVS 1.9.18 and earlier only work with rcs version 5 and later; current versions of cvsnt do not run rcs programs.

This message seems to be caused by a hard-to-track-down bug in cvsnt or the systems it runs on (we don't know--we haven't tracked it down yet!). It seems to happen only after a cvsnt command has completed, and you should be able to just ignore the message. However, if you have discovered information concerning its cause, please let us know as described in Appendix G, Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual.

This message is typically printed by the log.pl script which is in the contrib directory in the cvsnt source distribution. In some versions of cvsnt, log.pl has been part of the default cvsnt installation. The log.pl script gets called from the loginfo administrative file. Check that the arguments passed in loginfo match what your version of log.pl expects. In particular, the log.pl from cvsnt 1.3 and older expects the logfile as an argument whereas the log.pl from cvsnt 1.5 and newer expects the logfile to be specified with a -f option. Of course, if you don't need log.pl you can just comment it out of loginfo.

See EOF in key in rcs file.

This message typically means that the server is not set up properly. For example, if cvsmanager is running a bad cvs executable. To debug it further, find the log file which inetd writes (/var/log/messages or whatever inetd uses on your system). For details, see the section called “Trouble making a connection to a CVS server”, and the section called “Setting up the server for Authentication”.

See the section called “Trouble making a connection to a CVS server”.

This means that someone else has committed a change to that file since the last time that you did a cvs update. So before proceeding with your cvs commit you need to cvs update. cvsnt will merge the changes that you made and the changes that the other person made. If it does not detect any conflicts it will report M file and you are ready to cvs commit. If it detects conflicts it will print a message saying so, will report C file, and you need to manually resolve the conflict. For more details on this process see the section called “Conflicts example”.

Only one of [exEX3] allowed

This indicates a problem with the installation of diff3 and rcsmerge. Specifically rcsmerge was compiled to look for GNU diff3, but it is finding unix diff3 instead. The exact text of the message will vary depending on the system. The simplest solution is to upgrade to a current version of cvsnt, which does not rely on external rcsmerge or diff3 programs.

If text contains a valid response (such as ok) followed by an extra carriage return character (on many systems this will cause the second part of the message to overwrite the first part), then it probably means that you are using the :ext: access method with a version of rsh, such as most non-unix rsh versions, which does not by default provide a transparent data stream. In such cases you probably want to try :server: instead of :ext:. If text is something else, this may signify a problem with your cvsnt server. Double-check your installation against the instructions for setting up the cvsnt server.

This is a normal message, not an error. See the section called “Several developers simultaneously attempting to run CVS”, for more details.

This means that the editor which cvsnt is using exits with a nonzero exit status. Some versions of vi will do this even when there was not a problem editing the file. If so, point the CVSEDITOR environment variable to a small script such as:

#!/bin/sh
vi $*
exit 0