Today I faced a strange problem setting up CVS pserver as an xinetd service. I was getting “Permission denied” error on CVSROOT/config file. But cvs ran as root and config file permission were ok. Then I realized (by reading this post) that the problem was SELinux.

setenforce 0

solved the problem. I have to dig a little more on restorecon and ls -Z to understand how to setup SElinux, xinetd and CVS in the right way.