Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 14:53:52 -0500 (EST) From: Evan Champion <evanc@synapse.net> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Any interest in replacing rdist with rdist 6.1.3? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971129143514.12368D-100000@cello.synapse.net>
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I don't know whether or not this has been discussed (probably over and over :-) before but as I ran in to this problem I thought I'd ask... The standard FreeBSD rdist assumes that it is talking to a regular rsh and that stdin/stdout are just pointers to the same, bidirectional socket. This is not the case with an encrypting Kerberos 4 rsh, any mode for Kerberos 5 rsh, and I would bet ssh as well, where stdin/stdout are unidirectional pipes. Suffice it to say that the standard rdist doesn't work for these cases. rdist 6.1.3, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It seems to work with pretty much everything. As it is (rightly so) en vogue to replace one's rsh with something a little more secure, IMHO FreeBSD should be making it as easy as possible for users to migrate over to a better rsh. The only major drawback to rdist 6 is that it uses an incompatible protocol. However, it is backwards-compatible, in that if you try and use it in the old rdist -Server mode, it will exec the old rdist if available. To talk to an old server, you'd have to run the old rdist. Because it is largely backwards-compatible, IMHO it would be a good idea to upgrade to 6.1.3. OpenBSD has already done it, so we can borrow their Makefiles :-) And we can always keep the old rdist to keep compatibility. I'm willing to come up with the /usr/src tree if other people agree that this is a reasonable thing to do. Evan
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