r-command gives "permission denied"

[Pedro Sousa]

Hi people!
Can you help me on this?

Since some days ago, the remsh command started working intermittently!!
some times it gives me "permission denied":

userA@nodeA:/users/userA> remsh nodeB -l userB -n df -k
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 422967 269854 110823 71% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s3 25919 17782 5547 77% /var
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s7 1440414 1089209 207165 85% /export/home
swap 87292 844 86448 1% /tmp
userA@nodeA:/users/userA> remsh nodeB -l userB -n df -k
permission denied


in the example above, I'm trying to remsh a solaris (nodeB) system, from HPUX (11.0 - nodeA), it works sometimes, but it also doesn't.
Also if I try to do it from another hpux system, it works without any problems!! why?
thanx

[melvyn burnard]

I suspect you may have a name resolution issue here. If you try using the ip address, instead of the hostname, does this always work?
Bear in mind, the remote host has to be able to reverse lookup the name of the system that is sending it the request.

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Hi,

Permission denied is a generic message and in fact your problem could be related to name resolution. Second thing I found is that it could be related to your .rhosts file (do you use it or hosts.equiv ?) if it's NFS mounted. I have seen very old problems on hp-ux where remsh commands reacts differently depending on wether the .rhosts file was or not in cache. What is the mode of your .rhosts file and is it NFS mounted ?

Regards,

Jean-Louis.

[Stefan Farrelly]

These sorts of dns lookup failures are very difficult to pin down and resolve. The solution weve been forced to use to ensure this works all the time is to have key hosts in your /etc/hosts file and configure /etc/nsswitch.conf to look in files if dns takes too long or doesnt resolve.

[Pedro Sousa]

Melvin,
I've already tried with the IP address instead, but the result is the same.

Jean, the userB has the .rhosts file with permissions 755.

Stefan, I have the nodeA in /etc/hosts of nodeB, and the nsswitch.conf of nodeB has the following rule for looking-up addresses:
hosts: files dns

So, thanks for the answers, but I still have the problem :|

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Hi,

So your problem seems to be related to the source host ... Did you see any other new network related problem with this host NodeA ? Sometimes I've seen strange results with duplicate IPs (if someone has chosen recently the same IP as you NodeA).

Regards,

Jean-Louis.

[Pedro Sousa]

well... it's solved!!
the problem was that the system had 2 gateways and the packets were using them alternatively.

thanx for the responses.