Need rdist to use SSH, not .rhosts

[Mark Sauer]

Q: Due to tighter controls mandated by my company's Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts, I am no longer permitted to use a .rhosts file. I really need the functionality of rdist, which requires the .rhosts file. Thus I need a version of rdist, or equivalent utility, that will use my SSH setup. Running HP-UX 11.11 with HP Secure Shell 3.91.008. Thanks!

[Alex Lavrov.]

http://www.magnicomp.com/rdist/rdist.shtml

There is a version of rdist where you can choose the transport for rdist, which in your case will be SSH.

It's goind something like "rdist -P /usr/bin/ssh ...." (see man page)

In porting archive they have a depot only for 10.20, so I think you'll have to compile it yourself.
http://gatekeep.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Admin/rdist-6.1.5/

Alex.

[Mark Sauer]

Thanks Alex. Already looked at both sites. The MagniComp site seems to be obsolete / abandoned. Tried porting archive - got rdist to compile but since the code was written for 10.20, testing failed on our HP-UX 11.11 systems. We don't have the programming expertise in-house to modify the code for 11.11.

[Alex Lavrov.]

What exactly fails?

[Mark Sauer]

Alex, I'm sorry, but I don't have the details. We were scrambling, and when rdist failed, we gave up. With unsupported software, you need heavy-duty programming skills if it doesn't work right. As I recall, it seemed to work for the simplest test, moving one file from server A to server B. But as soon as we tried more sophisticated distfiles, it failed.

[Alex Lavrov.]

Well, after come googling I didn't find something similar to rdist what can maintain secure connections. Ofcourse there are some software distribution systems that I can think of, like module they have in Tivoli, but it costs fortune and takes a lot of time to maintain.

Maybe you can still use your current verion of rdist and just "wrap" it in SSH protocol. It's called "ssh tunneling". I don't use rdist, so I can tell you exactly how to do it. I think that with your experience with rdist, after reading some articles about it (google has plenty links for it), you can make it work.

Alex.

[Ermin Borovac]

A couple of alternatives ...

(1) rsync

http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/features.html

Can use ssh for transfer.

$ rsync -avz -e ssh :

Batch mode can be used to apply the same set of updates to many identical systems, but is considered experimental.

(2) cfengine

Information at http://www.cfengine.org
HP-UX binary at http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/cfengine-2.1.14/

[Bob Ingersoll]

I've been using this on HP-UX 11i SSH without problem:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Admin/rdist-6.1.5/

This is the binary.

[Mark Sauer]

Thanks Alex and Ermin. Not sure about SSH tunneling. Already working with rsync; need to study the many options. Never heard of cfengine. If rdist is really "dead" in shops that cannot have .rhosts, as it seems, I've got a lot of work to do in order to replace it with something else. I've used the following flags with rdist: -v -y -M. I need to get as close as I can to the functionality of those rdist options.

-Mark

[Mark Sauer]

Thanks Bob. The 6.1.5 code is exactly what we tested, unsuccessfully. Notice that the code was posted in April 1999, for 10.20.

Did you have to modify the code to run in your 11i environment?

-Mark

[Kent J. Siemers_1]

Just an update for everyone: The HP-UX Porting Center has changed its look. I suspect that Utah is now a mirror of the UK site, which is http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/ . Someone tweaked the source file, adding os-hp11.h . Now the source compiles without any complaints about missing libraries.

In our testing of this revised version, we also discovered that you need both programs in /opt/rdist/bin, rdist and rdistd. (This is documented in the readme files, but we missed it.)

Oh, my name is Kent, and I work with Mark Sauer.

[Kent J. Siemers_1]

Correction: that header file is "os-hpux11.h".