Setting Up CVS
No, Tim, setting up a CVS repo is astonishingly obfuscated and nowhere explained. Since I did it recently, I'll recount the steps.
Each time I go to set one up, it takes me half an hour just to remember how to do it the easy way. That's when the repo will be local or network-mounted. The answer is very simple:
$ mkdir /path/to/the/repo # (if you need to)
$ cd /where/the/code/is/now
$ cvs -d/path/to/the/repo import module-name VENDOR INITIAL
... chugs away ...
$ cd .. # because the next command will create a dir called module-name
$ cvs -d/path/to/the/repo checkout module-name
What you use for VENDOR and INITIAL is unimportant. You'll be stuck doing cvs checkout module-name for a long time, though, so choose module-name carefully.
If you forget the three parameters to import, just doing cvs import will remind you.
If you want to use the :pserver method, I think that's relatively easy, as it just does ssh to the given box and tunnels all the traffic over that. I haven't done this recently, so I won't give a recipe. If you want to use the cvsd method, it's much more involved—you have download and run the cvsd server; I did it once and it wasn't worth it.