Hi,

I am trying to do rsh on to a redhat EL 5 machine. It repeatedly asks me for the password and die after sometime. One might think that I am giving the wrong password. But I can do 'ssh' on to that machine with the same password.

Can someone tell me what I have been doing wrong?

Thanks,
Sundeep.

rsh is likely disabled or rhosts is configured incorrectly.

Then you should stick with SSH.
Nowadays on almost all Linux distros the Berkely r* commands have been deactivated
or don't get installed at all by a default installation for very good reason
and thus require some extra work and a slight bit of knowledge to become operational.
I think this is meant to scare off the totally uninitiated
to prevent them from inadvertently open up security holes.
For instance per default on RHEL if I remember correctly you would only find
kherborized versions of rsh and telnet, and which newbie is running a Kherebros server?
The only justified reason I can see to use rsh over ssh would be in a trusted host
environment on nodes within a cluster.