Hey guys.

I am working with some older technology for a customer that has some legacy processes and we are struggling to get rsh working. We have two servers, both SuSE 8 running the 2.4.19-64GB-SMP kernel and one of them works without issue and the other one works sporadically. In the message log we log some of the follwing:

Dec 15 14:36:11 cbcm2 in.rshd[21491]: connect from 10.94.56.54 (10.94.56.54)
Dec 15 14:36:11 cbcm2 rshd[21491]: Couldn't look up address for ce1bodocke1: Nam
e or service not known
Dec 15 14:36:11 cbcm2 rshd[21491]: rsh denied to server@ce1bodocke1 as server: C
ouldn't get address for your host (%s)
Dec 15 14:36:11 cbcm2 rshd[21491]: rsh command was 'cd /u/server/data/;ls -l tes
te*.spl'


If I do a dig on ce1bodocke1 it gets an answer in 0 msec. This works intermittently and then fails on occaison.

The host.allow is clean, no entries. The host.deny and host.equiv are as follows.

# See `man tcpd´ and `man 5 hosts_access´ as well as /etc/hosts.allow
# for a detailed description.

http-rman : ALL EXCEPT LOCAL


#
# hosts.equiv This file describes the names of the hosts which are
# to be considered "equivalent", i.e. which are to be
# trusted enough for allowing rsh(1) commands.
#
# hostname
+


The .rhosts starts with a + sign entry and is rather extensive but the following is the first line.

cbcm2:/u/server # head .rhosts
+


I know this is clear text and should not be used and have tried to steer them towards passwordless ssh, without success. Their entire enterprise makes heavy use of rsh.

Can you guys dust off your rsh hats and steer me in the right direction. It seems like the ones that work we get a FQDN, with the domain name and the ones that fail only have the remote host name.

Thanks.

Help... Anyone out there on that can point me in the right direction on this? Any assist would be greatly appreciated.

If this means what I think ie FQDNs always work, hostnames/aliases are intermittent
then the quick n dirty fix is to go through all the calls and fix FQDNs in; even better, use IPAddrs

If dig/nslookup is intermittent, then the DNS server has an issue of some kind; more than one DNS server or entries also in /etc/hosts files?
That is, even FQDNs have to be looked up to translate to IPAddrs ... It's inconsistent that FQDNs work and shortnames don't...
Compare the results of dig for the same systems using FQDN & shortname.