   cvsd - chroot wrapper to run 'cvs pserver' more securely.

   cvsd was originally written by Chris Black <cblack@mokey.com>,
   http://cblack.mokey.com/. That was until release 0.6.

   cvsd versions up till 0.8b3 were maintained by Philippe Kehl
   <phkehl@gmx.net>, http://guv.ethz.ch/~flip/cvsd/,
   http://www.oinkzwurgl.org/software/cvsd/.

   after that Arthur de Jong <arthur@arthurdejong.org>
   took up the work and did a complete rewrite,
   https://arthurdejong.org/cvsd.

   Copyright (C) 1999 Chris Black.
   Copyright (C) 2000 Philippe Kehl.
   Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,
                 2010, 2011, 2012, 2024 Arthur de Jong.

   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
   any later version.

   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
   GNU General Public License for more details.

   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
   along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
   Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA


INTRODUCTION
============

cvsd is a wrapper program for cvs in pserver mode. it will run 'cvs pserver'
under a special uid/gid in a chroot jail.

cvsd is run as a daemon and is controlled through a configuration file. It is
relatively easy to configure and provides tools for easy setting up a chroot
jail.

This server can be useful if you want to run a public cvs pserver. You should
however be aware of the security limitations of running a cvs pserver. If you
want any kind of authentication you should really consider using secure shell
as a secure authentication mechanism and transport. Passwords used in cvs
pserver are transmitted in plain text.

This wrapper adds a layer of security to the cvs server. cvs is a very
powerful tool and is capable of running scripts and other things. Running cvs
in a chroot jail it is possible to limit the amount of "damage" cvs can do if
it is exploited. It is generally a good idea to run cvsd without any write
permissions to any directory on the system.

Features of cvsd include:
 * running in chroot jail
 * configuring chroot jail
 * running under a non-root uid
 * set a nice value
 * limit resource usage
 * limit number of connections
 * relatively easy to set up


INSTALLING CVSD
===============

In short:
  % ./configure
  % make
  % make install

You can add '--sysconfdir=/etc', '--prefix', '--enable-warnings' and/or
'--enable-debug' options to configure to tune installation. Debugging is only
recommended for finding bugs.

cvsd is developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and should work fine on most
GNU/Linux systems. The code is supposed to be portable but is not regularly
tested on other platforms. cvsd is known to work on Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD
and others.

tcp wrappers
------------

cvsd currently has experimental support for tcp wrappers. Use './configure
--with-libwrap' to enable support. Most versions of the tcp wrapper libraries
have issues with systems supporting IPv6, see the FAQ.

Using this option will have a slight performance hit on the number of
connections that can be handled per minute. For each incoming connection the
tcp wrapper reads the configuration files and does a name lookup. This is done
inside the main loop before the child is forked..

Also note that you have to edit the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files INSIDE
the chroot jail since the tcp wrapper libraries reread these files for every
connection.


CONFIGURING CVSD
================

cvsd is controlled through a configuration file in /etc/cvsd/cvsd.conf (or
maybe /usr/local/etc/cvsd/cvsd.conf depending where you set --prefix to with
configure). The default configuration file is fully commented and has a
manual page (cvsd.conf(5)) which documents use of the configuration file.

very quick setup guide
----------------------

The is just a series of commands to set up cvsd in a typical read-only setup.
If you don't understand these steps or are looking for commands that work on
your system you should look below for further details.

  # addgroup --system cvsd       (or groupadd)
  # adduser --system --ingroup cvsd --home /var/lib/cvsd \
            --shell /bin/false --gecos 'cvs pserver daemon' cvsd
  # cvsd-buildroot /var/lib/cvsd
  # cvs -d /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos init
  # cvsd-passwd /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos +anonymous
  # touch /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos/CVSROOT/writers
  edit /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos/CVSROOT/config
    add "SystemAuth=no"
    add "PamAuth=no"      (on systems that have this option)
    add "LockDir=/tmp/myrepos"
  # mkdir /var/lib/cvsd/tmp/myrepos
  # chown cvsd:cvsd /var/lib/cvsd/tmp/myrepos
  edit /etc/cvsd/cvsd.conf
    set "RootJail /var/lib/cvsd"
    set "Repos /myrepos"

You should now be able to continue with the section "checking the
configuration" below.

setting up the user and group
-----------------------------

You should setup a user and group under which cvsd is run. Adding users to
the system is different on most platforms but this should work for most
systems:
  # addgroup cvsd
  # adduser --system --ingroup cvsd --home /var/lib/cvsd \
            --shell /bin/false --gecos 'cvs pserver daemon' cvsd
or maybe (or some other variation depending on your system):
  # groupadd cvsd
  # useradd -r -M -d /var/lib/cvsd -s /bin/false \
            -c "cvs pserver daemon" -g cvsd cvsd

(replace /var/lib/cvsd with the place where your chrooted file system is
located)

setting up a chroot jail
------------------------

You can populate a chrooted file system with cvsd-buildroot. You should rerun
this script if your cvs binary changes or the libraries that it depends upon.
The place where you create the chroot file system should be specified in the
configuration file as the 'RootJail'. It is possible (but not advisable) to
run cvsd without a chrooted file system.

If you plan to run stuff like the scripts from the contrib/ subdirectory in
cvs, then you have to have all necessary binaries, libraries etc. etc. in the
chrooted file system. You can just put the needed binaries in the 'bin'
directory of the chroot jail and 'cvsd-buildroot' will install the needed
libraries. Please note that this may require manual reconfiguring.

Some systems may require extra libraries to be present in the chrooted file
system than can not be automatically detected (using ldd). See the FAQ for
details.

disabling inetd pserver
-----------------------

If inetd is configured to start cvs /etc/inetd.conf should contain a line
like this:
  cvspserver   stream   tcp  nowait  root /usr/bin/cvs --allow-root /home/cvs
You should remove or comment out this line or tell cvsd to listen on a
different port (use Listen option in cvsd.conf). If you change inetd.conf you
should tell inetd to reload it's configuration by:
  # kill -s HUP <pidofinetd>

setting up a repository
-----------------------

If you have configured the chroot jail and the user and group id bits you can
start adding repositories to the chroot jail. There are a couple of ways you
could do that.

The first is creating an empty repository with something like:
  # cvs -d /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos init
(where /var/lib/cvsd is the location of the chroot jail and myrepos is the
name of the new repository)

Another way is copying an already existing repository to the chroot jail. It
is also possible to do something smart with a tool like 'rsync'. Put this in
a cronjob for extra effect.

Symbolic linking a repository to the chroot jail is not possible since
symbolic links will be evaluated within the chroot jail. Hard linking directories
should be avoided (hard linking in general in my opinion). With Linux 2.4 (and
probably other systems) it is possible to remount an existing directory
within another directory. You can use mount:
  # mount --bind /home/user/develrepos /var/lib/cvsd/userrepos
or add something like this to /etc/fstab:
  /home/user/develrepos /var/lib/cvsd/userrepos none bind 0 0
(don't forget to create the /var/lib/cvsd/userrepos directory)

After you have created or copied a repository into the chroot jail you should
add it to the cvsd.conf configuration file so cvs can access it. Use the
'Repos' option for this and remember to specify it relative to the chroot
jail. So if your repository is /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos you should add 'Repos
/myrepos' to the configuration file.

The last step for making your repository accessible is to add a passwd file
to the 'CVSROOT' directory of the repository. The cvsd-passwd tool will do
this for you.
  cvsd-passwd /var/lib/cvsd/myrepos anonymous
This will add user 'anonymous' to the list of users that can access the
repository. You will be prompted for a password which can optionally be
blank.

Note that the cvsd user needs to have the correct permissions to the
repository. The cvsd user probably should have read access to the repository
but probably no write permission. You can add all users in the repository
passwd file to a file named 'readers' in the 'CVSROOT' directory or create an
empty 'writers' file. Without any of these files all users have write access!

If you set up your repository so that the cvsd user only has read access to
the files and directories in the repository (through unix file permissions)
you need to take some extra provisions since cvs creates lockfiles when
checking out files from the repository. The best way to do this is to create
a directory for the cvsd user to write the lockfiles to (e.g.
/var/lib/cvsd/tmp/myrepos) and add "LockDir=/tmp/myrepos" to the
/var/lib/cvsd/myrepos/CVSROOT/config file. Be sure to create the directory
and make it writable for the cvsd user. If your cvsd user has write access to
the repository this should be no problem.

It is also a good idea to put "SystemAuth=no" and maybe "PamAuth=no" in your
CVSROOT/config file. This way password lookups will only be done to
CVSROOT/config and not to /etc/passwd inside the chroot jail (that passwd
file shouldn't contain any passwords) or PAM.

See the "Password authentication server" section in the cvs texinfo document
for more information about running a pserver and setting up repositories.


CHECKING THE CONFIGURATION
==========================

If you have started cvsd with the provided init script:
  # /etc/init.d/cvsd start
(or /usr/local/etc/init.d/cvsd start) and configured a repository (say
myrepos) you should be able to access the server with something like:
  % cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@localhost:/myrepos login
  % cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@localhost:/myrepos checkout .
For troubleshooting information see the FAQ on debugging.


REPORTING BUGS
==============

If you find any bugs or missing features please send email to
  cvsd-users@lists.arthurdejong.org
Please include as much information as needed (platform, output of configure
if compilation fails, output of the failure, etc). Most of the configuration
information can be provided by running cvsd-buginfo. Patches are more than
welcome.
