more secure alternatives to .rhosts and .netrc

[Mike_Ca Li]

HI:
I investigating more secure alternatives to .rhosts and .netrc for ftp
or shell communication between Sun boxes and Wintel boxes. I'm thinking
of certificates. I would like to get opinions and experiences from
persons who have done or attempting to do the migration from .rhosts /
.netrc to more secure methods. Thank you.

[Simon Hargrave]

Yes, you can use SSH with passphraseless keys. Not quite as secure as SSH with passphrases, but much more secure than .rhosts et al.

Once the certificates are setup you can use ssh (in place of remsh), sftp in place of ftp, and scp in place of rcp.

[TwoProc]

You need to check out ssh. Nice, secure, encrypted, key based. Provides a remote shell, securte encrypted ftp. You can push data through tar ball through the pipe, as well as Xwindows commands. Nice stuff.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

We are using secure shell for all our HP servers. (ssh,sftp,scp etc..)
You can also configure your SUN and wintel servers with similar things

www.openssh.org for more info.

-USA..

[Fred Ruffet]

Like others, I will recommend SSH. It is free, works pretty well, and is so much more secure than rcommands :)

For the Wintel part, I would suggest PuTTY. It's a SSH client to connect to your servers.
Fillezilla offers a free SSH2 SFTP graphical client.

Regards,

Fred

[Olivier Masse · Accepted solution]

Check this article by Brian Hatch on passwordless SSH logins. Highly recommended.
http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/20021211.html