I recently tried to list contents of some of the CVS servers without doing a checkout to see if it would be feasible to write a small script to identify hot spots in the development tree based on recent commits. I believe this functionality is disabled due to security or resource usage concerns.
The anoncvs.shar file shows most anon servers should chroot, drop privileges, and use read only mounts. I imagine it's the read only mount that's the sticking point. This can probably be accomplished using a local copy or a cloned server using cvssync. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something with regard to why ls/dir doesn't seem to work. Thanks.
