Doing remsh from SUN machine to HP machine gives protocol error?

[pap]

when I do remsh from sun machine say sun.123.com to HP machine say hp.123.com it gives protocol error.

Actually when I run following command from sun.123.com
#remsh hp.123.com ls
it gives error as below :
"Protocol error hp.123.com connection closed."

When I checked syslog.log file on HP.123.com I gor following entry in it.

" hp pprshd2.2: gethostbyaddr: sun.123.com != 123.456.789.234"

One more interesting thing is that I am able to do remsh sometimes. I mean if I run remsh 4-5 times it fails 2-3 times. I am not able to figure out why this happens.

FYI, the sun machine has been insytalled ssh2.2 on it while on HP nothing has been installed. I installed secure shell on HP machine, however the probelm remianed same.
Please help me with this.
Your help is highly appreciated in advance.

Thanks,
-pap

[Pramod_4]

Check the following:

Do you have more than one IP attached with HP hostname ?

if yes, Can you ping both IP's from SUN ?

Try using IP address instead of host name and see whether it works.

Good luck,

Pramod

[rick jones]

It would appear that remsh on the hp system is doing what is called a "reverse lookup" on the IP address. That is, it is taking the IP address it knows was used for the remsh connection (returned either by accept() or getpeername()), calling gethostbyaddr to map that back to a hostname, and then comparing the result to the hostname the Sun box claimed was his when he connected.

It would seem the two do not match consistently.

That the problem is inconsistent implies that one or more of your sources of hostname/IP mappings is configured differently than the others. Perhaps you have a /etc/hosts file that is out of date, but only being queried when the DNS server(s) cannot be reached. Examination of the "hosts" entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf would tell you what sources of hostname/IP resolution are being used by your system. If there is no /etc/nsswitch.conf file, but there is a /etc/resolv.conf file, the system will use DNS.

I would suggest running nslookup or perhaps dig against the IP address of the Sun box several times and make sure that it always gets the same answer (or not).

[Martin Johnson]

If you have more than one DNS server, make sure they all are resolving the host name(s) correctly.

HTH
Marty