[Beowulf] passwordless rsh/ssh

[David Mathog]

>> Did anyone know how to make rsh passwordless?

>Read man hosts.equiv, or learn how to build a .rhosts file.  Or both.
>Note that you may have to tweak PAM or other authentication controls to
>get it to work -- linux has several distinct layers where one can BLOCK
>passwordless logins or rsh in general, and they all have to be set
>correctly for it to work.

On a somewhat related note I recently discovered that the
use of

  rsh -l fred mandrake somecommand

fails when the target is a Mandrake 10.0 machine, even when "fred"
and whoever issues the command can both do rsh (via .rhosts and/or
hosts.equiv) AND when the command works as expected when sent
to a Solaris host. It failed for three different rsh
implementations (two on linux, one on Solaris) leading me
to suspect either some obscure  configuration error for
in.rshd is getting in the way.  Either that or the in.rshd
on this linux is broken.

The in.rshd on linux comes from:  rsh-server-0.17-13mdk

Anybody else seen this?

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech