[gentoo-server] setting up cvsd pserver

[Kurt Lieber]

We're in the process of setting up an anonymous CVS server for public use.
As part of this, I'm running into a few issues related to the chroot and
permissions on devices.  I can successfully authenticate using:

 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@newserver:/repositories login

But when I try to check something out, I get:

 $ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@newserver:/repositories checkout gentoo-x86
 open /dev/null failed
 Permission denied

But the permissions on the chrooted /dev/null device look fine:

 # ls -alh /chroot/dev/null
 crwxrwxrwx  1 root root 1, 3 Jan  1  1970 /chroot/dev/null

strace gives me:

12095 open("/dev/null", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
12095 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x55ce1000
12095 write(1, "E open /dev/null failed\nerror  P"..., 49) = 49

I used cvsd-buildroot to build the chroot....during this process, it
complained about devices:

 creating /chroot/dev devices... FAILED (unable to use devices)

The kernel on this box is 2.6.11-hardened-r15 and we're using grsecurity...I
kind of suspect that is the problem, but I don't have enough experience
with it to troubleshoot.  Short of building a new kernel and removing grsec
options one by one, can anyone suggest some other things to try?
(including those that might not have anything to do w/ grsec)

tia.

--kurt