I'm republishing this edited version because it changed a lot. :)

The CVS setup for AudioMan has to be used in two ways. The first is secure access for committers that will make changes. The second is open access to everyone else that wants to download the code and submit patches to AudioMan's Bugzilla system. This post describes how I set up the secure access so far and will change as I get feedback from people.

RedHat 8 installed CVS for me but I still have to initialize it. Here are the steps I've followed using su to gain root priveleges.

1. Make /usr/local/cvsroot/ directory.
2. Initialize the CVS repository:

cvs -d /usr/local/cvsroot init

3. Make a Linux group to manage access to the repository. Only users in that group will be able to commit to the repository.

groupadd cvs

4. Add users to the cvs group by editing /etc/group. Find the line starting with cvs and add users to the end to give them cvs access. The anonymous user is for read-only access later.

cvs:*:105:rlowe,anonymous

5. Change the group of the cvsroot directory:

chgrp -R cvs /usr/local/cvsroot

6. Change the permissions on the cvsroot directory so that only the group can edit files. This gives read, write and execute permission to the user (root) and group (cvs) and no access to others.

chmod -R ug+rwx /usr/local/cvsroot

7. Change the permission on the cvsroot directory so that new files added to it are assigned to the group cvs by default (thanks Kris):

chmod -R g+s /usr/local/cvsroot

8. If you plan on checking in binary files, you should add them to the CVSROOT/cvswrappers file. The types I added were gif, jpg, ico, mp3, jar, dll. For example, here's an entry for JAR files:

*.jar -k 'b'

For a more complete list, go here.

9. Set the CVSROOT environment variable to simplify commands:

export CVSROOT=/usr/local/cvsroot

10. Go into your project directory and add the your project to the cvs repository:

cvs import -m "initial" AudioMan rlowe start

Where rlowe is the vendor name and start is the initial release name.

You can give users secure remote access to a CVS repository with SSH (secure shell). RedHat 8 installed an SSH daemon, I just had to make sure it was running. The easiest way to do that is in the GUI (Bluecurve). Open the menu on the toolbar and go to Server Settings --> Services. From that interface you can start, stop and restart daemons on your machine. Start the sshd daemon and check the checkbox if you want it to start when the machine boots.

References:
1. Open Source Development with CVS
2. cvs [login aborted]: reading from server: Connection reset by peer
3. Chrooted tunnelled read-write CVS server