Remote Repository Access

After determining that everyone involved in the project can access the repository while directly logged into the PCSE system, you and your team members can use the SSH (Secure Shell) program to remotely access your CVS repository, provided both CVS and SSH are installed locally on your system.

Before attempting to connect to the remote server, you may wish to set the environment variable $CVS_RSH to contain the value ``ssh'', unless the rsh executable on your system is already a link to ssh.

The way you invoke CVS from the local system is as follows:

cvs -d :ext:mbland@defender:/home/student/mbland/cvsroot checkout class_proj

where

• ext indicates that you are using a version of rsh external to CVS (ssh in our case)

• mbland@defender is replaced by your own username on the host you are trying to access, plus the name of the remote host

As before, you may set a default $CVSROOT on the local system in the same fashion as you may have set $CVS_RSH. Bear in mind that the value of $CVSROOT would consist of the entire string:

:ext:mbland@defender:/home/student/mbland/cvsroot

If your system lacks the capability to connect to the repository with SSH, you may still log into the PCSE system, check out the sources within your account, and download them to your local machine. Then you would need to upload your changes to your working copies on the PCSE system and commit them back to the repository from there. However, this procedure is inefficient, insecure, and error-prone. Use SSH if it is available⁵.

For more introductory information on SSH, reference the Hunter Creech lab document Introduction to SSH Versions 1 and 2.