Allowing users to run the remote shell program (rsh) without a password (AIX® Linux®)

If you do not want to use a secure shell connection, you can choose instead to use rsh for each parallel engine connection. As with ssh, the connections must be able to be established without a password prompt.

About this task

You achieve rsh connections differently according to your type of system. For example, you can edit the /etc/hosts.equiv file or create a .rhosts file for each user. In both cases, add the host name of each parallel processing node to the /etc/hosts.equiv file or the .rhosts file, specifying one host name per line.

The host name that is included in this file must correspond to the setting of the node fastname parameter in the parallel configuration file, which is located in the /opt/IBM/InformationServer/Server/PXEngine directory by default.

Procedure

  1. Use one of these methods to allow users to run rsh without a password:
    • Edit the /etc/hosts.equiv file. The file must be owned by the root user, must grant read and write access to the root user, and grant no access to any other user (file mode of 600).
    • Create a .rhosts file for each user. The file must be located in the home directory of each parallel user, be owned by the user, and grant read/write access to the user and no access to any other user (file mode of 600).
  2. On each node, use this command to verify that users can use rsh without a password: 
    rsh host_name uptime

    host_name is the name of a compute node. If host_name is accessible, this command prints a message displaying the time it has been up.