On Apr 20, 2005, at 7:45 PM, MacBSD-68k@caution.icompute.com wrote:

>> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 12:28:33PM -0500, Donald Lee wrote:
>>> I ran into three killer problems, though.
>>>
>>> 1. rsh was unreliable.  There are a few of my scripts that do rsh 
>>> operations
>>> to other machines, and when I ran these scripts, the rsh would
>>> hang (for days, not minutes or hours)  This was unpredictable, but
>>> very repeatable.  (The "other machine" in this case is running 
>>> NetBSD 1.6.2)
>>
>> That's very strange. I'd suggest posting on tech-net about this. Is 
>> DNS
>> set up right (thoguh that shouldn't hang for days...)?
>
> It didn't behave like a DNS problem.  I had shell scripts that did 
> series
> of rsh operations on the "main" box, and about 1 in 4 would not finish.
> It seemed to vary which one, too, and didn't seem to matter what the
> load on (either) machine was.

I've seen situations on Solaris where the rsh program hangs after the 
remote command terminates.  It was rare but it happened often enough to 
warrant a switch to ssh.  You might consider using ssh anyway because 
it passes back the remote process' exit status, too (and rsh does not).
--
Paul Sander       | "Lets stick to the new mistakes and get rid of the 
old
paul@wakawaka.com | ones" -- William Brown