Installing and Administering Internet Services

322 Chapter 10

Using rdist

Overview

Figure 10-1 Distributing Files with rdist

Note that the rdist process does not prompt for passwords. The user on

the master host who starts rdist (usually a system or network

administrator) must have an account on the remote host and must be

allowed remote command execution. (The working directory on the

remote host is the user’s home directory.) Or, you can specify a user name

on a remote host for rdist to use that has the appropriate permissions

for accessing ﬁles on that remote host. This is described in “Creating the

Distﬁle” on page 324.

rdist on the master host reads commands from a distﬁle, an ASCII ﬁle

that speciﬁes the ﬁles or directories to be copied, the remote hosts to be

updated, and the operations to be performed for the update. A distﬁle can

be speciﬁed when invoking rdist on the master host. Otherwise, rdist

looks in the current working directory for a ﬁle named distfile to use

as input; if distfile does not exist in the current working directory,

then rdist looks for Distfile.

System A

(Master Host)

rdist

System B

rdist

System C

rdist

Source Files:

filea1

filea2

filea3

Standard Output:

updating host B

installing: filea1

installing: filea2

installing: filea3

updating host C

. . .