remsh

[Manikantan IB]

Hi

It might be a silly question to ask...but still... being a toddler in HP-UX...i think i can ask :-)

My question is ... What is the prerequisite for remsh to work?

Thanks in advance !

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi,

For remsh to work from hosta to hostb you need:

on hosta:
nslookup hostb working
on hostb:
nslookup hosta working
.rhosts file in user's home directory contining one line with 'hosta'

Best regards,

Dan

[John Bolene]

Putting in the short name for the host did not work for us in this case. We had to put in the long DNS fully qualified name. Doing a who -a on the remote machine will tell you the DNS name to add to the .rhosts file. This name can be different for a machine with more than one LAN card and corresponding IP. You may be coming in one DNS name and not another.

John

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

In order for 'remsh' to work, you must have the 'shell' port defined in /etc/services, and the following line in /etc/inetd.conf :

shell stream tcp nowait root /usr/lbin/remshd remshd

To enable 'rexec', define the 'exec' service in /etc/services and the following in /etc/inetd.conf :

exec stream tcp nowait root /usr/lbin/rexecd rexecd

'rexec' works the same as 'remsh', except that 'rexec' prompts for a password before executing the command instead of querying the hosts.equiv for authentication.

Thus, 'rexec' can be substituted for 'remsh' in situations were there are no hostequiv(alent) files.

In order to use 'rcp', however, you must have hosteqivalent files setup. 'rcp' uses the 'remshd' server.

See the man pages for 'remshd (1M)', 'rexecd (1M)', and 'hosts.equiv (4).

...JRF...

[Shannon Petry]

I have to add the "hostequiv(alent)" file that was mentioned, but not defined.

There can be two types of files for ident checking.
1. $HOME/.rhosts

2. /etc/hosts.equiv

both are identical in the respect that it is a file, containing single host entries granting access to "rsh", "rexec", etc... to that host. For users sake, I maintain an "/etc/hosts.equiv" file, and have a script removing "$HOME/.rhosts". This allows me to control who is allowed to access which host and from where they can access.

NOTE: /etc/hosts.equiv DOES NOT WORK for root( I believe that all UID's under 10 are restricted to $HOME/.rhosts) Correct me if I am wrong on that one please!

Permissions on an /etc/hosts.equiv file should be 444 (read, read, read). Permissions on a $HOME/.rhosts file should be 400 (read, none, none).

Permissions are not required, but are good to have set!

Regards,
Shannon