CVSNT Server stores a copy of your files and documents and tracks all of the changes to it over time. Based on CVS which for fifteen years was the most popular versioning tool, CVSNT has added five years of development to build the best modern versioning solution. With 1.4 million downloads in the last year it's probably right for you too.
Runs on Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS X
CVSNT runs on the most popular servers and operating systems in the world. Choose from the easy to setup Windows systems, high reliability Unix systems from HP and Sun, affordable Linux from Red Hat or the sheep in wolfs clothing Mac OS X.
CVS began its life on Unix, but don't be fooled into thinking that CVSNT relies on any Unix filesystem or Unix emulation for Windows. CVSNT has a high performance native file system library on each platform to get the most performance and the highest reliability out of the file systems.
Configuring CVSNT on Windows is a simple matter of running the CVSNT control panel - just like any other Windows server is configured. Unix system adminstrators will find the CVSNT configuration files stored exactly where they expect, or they can build a custom CVSNT that has it's home anywhere on the system.
Effective Configuration Management
Implementing version control is the basis of a good configuration management system. But configuration management has a cost or if you prefer it has an overhead. People generally agree that the benefits of good configuration management will outweigh the costs. Lose an important change to a web site, a document or software source code and you'll quickly realise the cost of not versioning.
However most of the benefits of good configuration management come from developing a network of information about the reason for changes. This web page was changed because this new feature was added to the web site. This program was changed because of this bug report.
CVSNT makes it easy for you to get all of the benefits from configuration management by integrating with your other business systems. This is what we call Effective Configuration Management. Don't choose another system where you end up paying the price - but you never see the benefit.
Best Practice
Don't confuse CVSNT's twenty year pedigree with tools that have been around forever but have not kept up to date with modern best practice. CVSNT helps you manage your changes flexibly, providing ways to implement most modern configuration management practices.
All version control methodologies work - but there are many because different people and different organisations work in different ways. Just because someone else was successful with one methodology does not mean that you will. Look at your requirements, your culture, and your objectives and find a tool which will work with you - not against you.
The way CVSNT is developed is designed to get the most creative ideas and the most flexible approaches to versioning so they can be incorporated into one easy to use server.
Reliability and Security
CVSNT Servers just keep working. Twenty-four hours a day, each and every day of the year. This is not by accident, it's by design. We started with a fifteen year old versioning system called CVS, and we added modern memory management, API's for different interfaces, secure protocols and authentication schemes. This means that when you design and install your CVSNT server, you only install the pieces that you want.
If you want secure, then you can use the inbuilt SSH client, SSL encrypted connections, or use the in-built Kerberos encryption that Microsoft Windows uses to log you into the workstation with in the first place.
Tracking changes is only as accurate as your ability to track who made the change. By using the Windows authentication tokens, rather than an arbitrary username and password mechanism you can be sure that the name that is listed against a change is the name of the person who made the change. If you have activated auditing on the server - there is no way the user can proceed without the changes being logged - if the logging fails so does the requested action.
Change Sets
CVSNT Server incorporates support for user defined change sets (bug numbers, job numbers) so that each change you make to a file can be labelled with a meaningful change identification, whether it be your job number or the bug number. You can then organise your work according to these numbers, including finialising all work for the urgent job while leaving your long term projects untouched. The CVS Suite TortoiseCVS includes support for this built right in so it's easy to use. You can use the supplied server integration with Bugzilla or integrate to your own job management system.
Multi Site
CVSNT is designed from the very beginning to support multi site development across wide are networks. Twenty years ago when CVS was originally released the average local area network had less bandwidth than todays international wide area networks, so its protocols were designed to minimise network connections and traffic. For this reason alone CVSNT is the ideal server for a multi site development repository, but why stop at one reason when their are plenty more to choose from including Access Control and Secure Authorisation and Communication protocols.
Repository Replication
No disaster recovery plan for your organisation can be complete without a recovery scenario for your Versioning Repository. Every copy of CVSNT comes with cross platform Unison repository replication build right in. Synchronise your servers as often as you like efficiently and safely.
March Hare Software also offer advanced repository replication solutions for our Multi Site Level 4 or 5 Professional Support customers, contact a sales person today for more information.
Works Simply, Simply Works
CVSNT is designed to help you track changes to files - so we prefer to focus on it's ability to do just that. But for those who want to know, behind the scenes CVSNT has rename support, atomic checkouts, multi-threaded lock server, unique transaction identifiers (session identifiers and commit identifiers), meta data, user definable keywords, efficient handling of binary files and the code is structured as a set of modules with well-defined interfaces. Looking at some of our competitors web sites you'd think all that stuff was what was important. Yes CVSNT has all that - but what's important is getting your files versioned: accurately, securely, easily.
Stands Alone
In an enterprise datacenter, or even a small business, every piece of software you run on your servers increases the number of security alerts you need to keep up to date with. CVSNT doesn't need Apache or any other software to get you running - its what we call stand alone.
You can even send your audit logs to an SQL Server running on a different machine using ODBC. Choose from client repository browsers like CVS Suite Studio or run a web server and a web based browser like ViewCVS (any web server in your organisation).
Open Source
CVSNT is Open Source Software licensed under the GNU GPL. This means that you can get your own copy of the source code. It means that CVSNT is never going to disappear.
March Hare remains committed to the Open Source development model, and believe that it makes CVSNT a more robust, secure versioning system, as its core has been subjected to the crucible of peer review for decades. Any problems found with this software can be immediately identified and fixed by March Hare Software and the Open Source community.
If you're a developer, we invite you to inspect CVSNT under the hood, free of charge, by joining the CVSNT development process.