New system, can't get pserver working

[Jay Maynard]

I've been running 1.11.5's pserver for a couple of years now on Red Hat/Alpha
6.2. I just moved to Gentoo/Alpha 1.4, with 1.11.11. I've copied over the
repository with all ownership and permissions intact, and set up the proper
xinetd configuration, pointing to the proper root of the repository. The
server refuses to allow any access at all:

(538) address@hidden:~/Programming$ echo $CVSROOT
:pserver:address@hidden:/usr/cvs/hercules
(539) address@hidden:~/Programming$ cvs login
(Logging in to address@hidden)
CVS password: <password entered here>
cvs [login aborted]: recv() from server cvs.conmicro.cx: Connection reset by 
peer

The xinetd configuration is:

service cvspserver
{
        disable         = no
        socket_type     = stream
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        passenv         =
        log_type        = FILE /var/log/cvspserver
        protocol        = tcp
        env             = HOME=/usr/cvs/hercules
        log_on_failure  += USERID
        port            = 2401
        server          = /usr/bin/cvs
        server_args     = -f --allow-root=/usr/cvs/hercules pserver
}

The only messages logged are:

04/2/address@hidden:34:26: START: cvspserver pid=24930 from=192.83.120.4
04/2/address@hidden:34:26: FAIL: cvspserver address from=192.83.120.4

How do I look for what's going wrong?