~/.rhosts: put my username in there too?

Dan_Jacobson at ATT.COM Dan_Jacobson at ATT.COM
Sun Oct 28 18:46:42 AEST 1990


I've got 3 responses [Ed K., Jeff L., Mike M.].  My experience:

bob at beep$ cat ~/.rhosts
peep

pam at peep$ rlogin -l bob beep
Password: <--see, it asked pam for a password, so bob doesn't need to
say "peep bob" in his .rhosts file to keep pam out, as some folks
suggested. Saying just "peep" there worked fine.

[SunOS 4.0.3, nothing in /etc/hosts.equiv or /.rhosts. pam and bob
don't know root passwd.  "man rhosts" doesn't seem to contradict the
above. "man rhosts" says the 2nd field is optional, in contrast to
"man rlogin".]

Apparently the only use is if bob is called bob1 on peep, and bob on
peep is somebody else.  Then this would make sense,

bob at beep$ cat ~/.rhosts
peep bob1

...both keeping bob at peep out of bob at beep's account, and letting bob1 at peep
login into bob at beep without a password.  All well and good.

But I see no case where
NAME1 at host1$ cat ~/.rhosts
host2 NAME1

increases security, or changes anything.  [Same NAME1, both in the
user's name (represented by their prompt here), and in their 2nd
~/.rhosts field] [I'm talking about regular users throughout this
article, not root, etc.]
-- 
Dan_Jacobson at ATT.COM  Naperville IL USA  +1 708-979-6364



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