This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
possibility of a security hole. It now does what rdist-6 does, and calls
/usr/bin/rsh if not running as root. There are NO protocol changes, this
is 100% compatable with the old rdist, except that it does not need setuid
root privs.
However, there are some minor differences to the base rdist-6 code in that
if it is being run by root, it will call rcmd(3) directly rather than
piping everything through rsh(1). This is a little more efficient as it
doesn't involve context switching on pipe reads/writes.
Also, the -P option was added from rdist-6.1.2, which allows an alternative
rsh program to be specified, such as ssh. Note that it requires the fixes
to the ssh port to disable the unconditional USE_PIPES option that was
recently added. The rcmd(3) optimisation is disabled if a non-rsh program
is speficied.
Philippe Charnier
Peter Wemm
Jordan K. Hubbard