Quoting Wolfgang Rupprecht (wolfgang+gnus20020708T140121@wsrcc.com):
> 
> > You REALLY don't want to use rsh/rlogin.  OpenBSD has now removed
> > it from the tree; a decision I agree with entirely and encourage 
> > elsewhere.
> 
> What do those folks do for cron-based rdist-ing of files from their
> main server to the other machines on their net?
> 
> One of the biggest labor-saving cron tasks here is a weekly rdist that
> makes sure that everything but a handful of conf files are exactly the
> same on all the machines.  Who wants to maintain N systems by hand?

You use ssh.  And if you have rsh working without a password,
you get ssh to work without a password.

Either with .rhosts/.shosts or with keys for better auth.
It's really not hard.  I do it all the time.  I put ssh in
and rename it rsh and my users often never know.

Why is it so hard for you to understand?

Oh, and I've been using cf-engine for a while to make sure config
files are the same.  I've been toying with keeping cf-engine scripts
in LDAP as a misuse of LDAP to be a distributed info center.

I could either keep things like inetd.conf files directly in LDAP
(dump it, base64 decode it) or encoded scripts.  Easiest is to
use AFS as a readonly repository for it.