Hi ,
I installed MPICH on my RH9 box. MPICH uses rsh for communicating with localhost. It has occured to me that rsh is refusing conections.

I searched on the net and found that I need to make a .rhosts file in every user directory and it should have the hostname & username to use for rsh.

Even a command like rsh localhost /bin/ls is returning connection refused.

I saw a previous post on this forum which said that there was need to make a rsh file for xinetd to start it. I dont have that file looks like.

How do I go about creating it. & making rsh work??.Please help,

Best regards
haoscar

You have to see if the rshd server is installed. Normally this daemon receives the name "/usr/sbin/in.rshd". If you don't have it all you need is to install the rhsd package of your distribution. After install the package you will have "/etc/xinetd.d/rsh" which you must inspect/edit because there is a line "disable = yes" in this file. If this line is as I wrote it, you must edit it to "disable = no". After save this file, you must restart xinetd: "service xinetd restart". You don't have to put a .rhosts file in each user. You have just edit /etc/hosts.equiv to contain a list of trusted hosts and also a .rhosts in the /root directory which is the home for root. You have also put a line with "rsh" in /etc/securetty.

I hope this helps.

wont putting .rhosts file in root directory give access to run absolutely any command remotely.Isnt this dangerous. Or it not a thing to worryy??
Thanks for your reply,
haoscar

Any command really could be run but just from the machines you specify in /etc/hosts.equiv and /root/.rhosts.