rlogin and security

[Richard_115]

I have an issue. I want to write a script that I can traverse or rlogin to several systems and perform administrative tasks. But the hurdle is that these systems are having high security turned on i.e no .rhosts file and also CONSOLE on /etc/securetty. Can I be able to, say, have a script running from one machine onto several machines, turn off security, perform some administrative work, turn security features back on again and exit ???? In a sense, I have the script, but I can't figure out how I can bypass this security features. Don't get me wrong, these are my systems and I have high secirity turned on. But it becomes time consuming to telnet onto each system each morning for admin work.

Thanks

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Richard,

Don't think something like that is possible.

Thanks

[Jeff Machols]

One option would be to have a daemon running on these machines. They could look for a certain file to exists (/etc/nosec). If the daemon saw the file you could turn off the security. To create the files, you could have a ftp script set up to put this file on all the systems. You would just have to run the ftp script, then the security would be off. You could do the same thing to re-enable security.

[Helen French]

Hi Richard,

I don't think it is possible to do this. You may have to look in to the security procedures. Reduce the securtiy level of your remote systems and try performing your jobs.

HTH,
Shiju

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Richard,

If the systems are securely locked down, you can't get in to do what you want but you can look into alternative solutions to your issue. I strongly suggest ssh. Anything you could do with the "r" utilities can be done with ssh and much more securely.

That's what we did at my last job with the blessings of the security dept. I strongly advise against "turning off security" for any time to be able to run any tasks, administrative or otherwise.

Darrell

[Craig Rants]

Why don't you look at using ssh. You can use key encryption trusts on the box, make it seem like you at "improving" security by having all your work traverse the network encrypted, and you don't have to worry about turning on/off the security already in place to get your remote work done. I have that type of function setup in my envionment and it works great.

GL,
C

[fg_1]

Richard

ssh is the best option youre going to find since you have a high level of security turned on with respect to /etc/securetty and other functions locked down.

ssh is quite friendly and capable of handling some of what you want to do.

BTW what kind of daily task are you doing, and is it something that can be scripted and run in cron for a certain point in time and then have the results emailed to you using the root mail?