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Because rdistd is in /usr/sbin, which is not in the normal path, normal people attempting to rdist to a RedHat 5.1 system will fail with an error message like: targethost: LOCAL ERROR: Unexpected input from server: "sh: rdistd: command not found". In order for rdist'ing to something to work, rdistd must be on the normal search path that 'rsh foo command' gets one. I see two cures: 1) relocate rdistd to something that is on the normal search path for rsh (eg to /usr/bin). 2) add (via PAM or just defaults) /usr/sbin to the PATH that rshd gives to children. Until either happens, rdist is sort of broken. Please note that not all shells support running dotfiles on non-interactive (eg rsh'ing in) situations. I think that rdist should a) work 'out of the box' on a RedHat machine and b) even for people with such shells, so I don't consider a suggestion of 'change your .cshrc or whatever to add /usr/sbin' to be much of a solution. (I'm aware that this is a duplicate of another person's bug, but I want to complain about the situation not being resolved, and one can't reopen someone else's bug report to do that.)
Jeff, we really have to fix this one.
The argument that "rdist is mostly broken" doesn't hold water because "normal people" still have to setup their .rhosts to permit access. Setting the PATH environment variable is part of the process of permitting remote access that needs to be performed by the user, not Red Hat. Adding /usr/sbin to the PATH variable in a file read during non-interactive, non-login (i.e. rsh) access (i.e. ~/.bashrc for bash) permits rdist to work. For bash, add to ~/.bashrc PATH="$PATH:/usr/sbin" For tcsh (and csh), add to ~/.cshrc setenv PATH "${PATH}:/usr/sbin" Otherwise, create a symlink from /usr/sbin/rdistd to someplace within the path, as in ln -sf /usr/sbin/rdistd /usr/bin/rdistd I'll take a look at adding the /usr/bin/rdistd symlink in the rdist package, but the fix probably won't be in Red Hat 6.0. Thanks for this (and your many other) reports.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2075 ***