CVS user management: "no such system user", but there is too!
 

After browsing the internets for quite a while I have been unsuccessful in adding a special user to CVS. Unfortunately I did not set up this CVS server install so I don't know it inside out, but I have root access and can update anything that requires it.

I have a standard user/group "cvsd" for all my normal CVS users and in the CVSROOT/passwd file they all show up as user:*********:cvsd and they work great. I can add users to that all day, and they happily commit and remove and add and are merry. Now I want to set up a different user that only has access to one special repository for work we outsource. I do not want this user to have access to the rest of our repositories. I set up a new user "outside" and I have tried entering this in CVSROOT/passwd as outside:*********:outside as well as without the trailing :outside.

This user can login, but that's it. When I try to do anything beyond logging in, I get a message saying "outside: no such system user". This user exists in /etc/passwd. For some reason the prior admin simply set up a symbolic link to /etc/passwd in /var/lib/cvsd/etc/ instead of setting up the "standard" chroot jail stuffs I have read a bit about...

I did notice that in /etc/shadow that the password for the cvsd account is simply listed as "!" where the outside account has a real MD5-looking password (as I said this was not my server initially and I'm no expert in CVS administration).

The system is Debian 4 and I'm attempting to access CVS via Tortoise on WinXP.

Any suggestions? Tutorials to read? Threads I missed? More info required?

Thanks!!

#EW