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Tags CVS, CVSNT, Tutorial, Windows
This post details the setup of a repository server on a Windows based PC.
Download and install the CSVNT server here.
Make sure you pick the Windows Server software and not the “client trial”.
If you show all downloads you need to pick a server OS, not a client OS like Windows XP, even if installing on Windows XP Pro like I was. (You cannot install on XP home at all – you must have simple file sharing turned off and Windows XP Home cannot do this). In my case, simple file sharing was off as I had already turned off ForceGuest, see here.
You can pick a specific account for access, or use the client account – I presume the user/password must also match the server if you are in a workgroup rather than a domain but I did not test this. My installation was in a Workgroup with a specific account on the server PC. Note that you should run CVSNT under an account on the server with the minimum of privilege, rather than an administrator account. See here for details on how to do this.
The server runs 2 services – CVSNT Dispatch Service and CVSNT Locking Service, which both need to autostart (this is done by default). The server administration is via a control panel utility which is also available via the start menus.
Ensure that Simple File Sharing is turned off.
Make sure that you exclude cvsservice.exe and cvslock.exe in both the Windows Firewall and any Antivirus software.
In my case failure to do this caused 2 problems :-
- cvslock.exe crashed soon after startup
- The repository was not visible at all from the client side (in Eclipse) and would not connect – connection timeouts occurred.
You can run multiple repositories from a CVSNT server. In my case I am using a common root – “D:\CVS Repositories” and a subfolder for each respository underneath. My Java repository is named /Java and is similarly connected this way on the client. Its Root is therefore defined as D:\CVS Repositories\Java.
Connecting to the server
In all cases I use the pserver protocol – the Eclipse plugin does not support many protocols natively and pserver is the most common. I use the same protocol for Tortoise.. The server does not mandate the protocol used by the client (as far as I know) so provided the plugin is loaded for the protocol (see plugins page in the CVSNT control panel server admin tool) it should work. Pserver apparently only encrypts passwords but if you are running on a secure internal development network behind a firewall this should not be an issue, and should also improve performance as the protocol is not having to encrypt everything.
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