"rsh" question

[Bradley T. Freese]

johnk at locus.com (John Kim) writes:

> When I tried to invoke rsh on a machine in different network,
> I got error message "Permission Denied".
> There are .rhosts files in local and remote machines and
> entries are correct.  Also I can telnet to the remote machine with
> no problem.  Why can't I do rsh on the remote machine?
> This problem is not mentioned in the documention.
>
> Any clue?

The classic pitfalls in doing 'rsh', 'rcp', 'rlogin', and remote
printing all arise from bad hostname resolution.  In particular, the
worst culprit is reverse name resolution.  To check this, do the
following on *each* host:

1) For *every* other host, do "host <otherhost>".  You should get back
something like

    otherhost.domain.domain.domain is 99.99.99.99 ....

2) For *every* other host, do "host <otheraddress>", where <otheraddress>
is the address of the host.  You should get the same response as in 1).
If you don't (like "address 99.99.99.99 NOT FOUND"), your reverse name
resolution is not working.

Without working resolution, the r* daemons cannot identify the host
requesting the service, so it will deny permission.