LOTS and lots of clusterers use rsh or a lower-overhead replacement (notably Scyld's bpsh) because of the simplicity and automation aspects associated with the .rhosts file. Giving root the authority to use it is tricky in some distros but it is pretty widely understood and documented.
Junichi Uekawa of this group wrote dsh (http://packages.debian.org/testing/net/dsh.html) but I have not been able to try it yet. *********************************** Kurt Keville Debian Beowulf Users Group (DeBUG) http://www.extreme-linux.com Cluster On! ***********************************
