I need a cron job to shut services running on other nodes, do some db maintenance, then restart the remote services. This is HP-UX 11.00.

I cannot get remsh to work, even interactively. Per man page, does not prompt for password. I get:

remsh appserver -l oracle stop_services
remshd: Login incorrect.

If I don't specify the stop_services command, then remsh runs rlogin (as per the man page), which works, but is not what I want. I have tried using rlogin in a job, but no luck there either - seems I can't redirect stdin.

rexec appserver -l oracle stop_services

I get further with rexec. The above works interactively, and it prompts for password. I have tried various ways to feed the password in a job.

Are there security concerns? If not, double check your info for rsh, rlogin, .rhosts, or /etc/hosts.equiv. You may be missing a simple ingredient to get these commands to work.

If you can't get any of the remote command to work, you could try setting up a cron job on each remote system that waits for a specific file to be ftp'd over - along with a loop, sleep, and if statement which would allow it to stop trying after a specified time.

Or you could check into cfengine - not sure it would do exactly what you want. http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/
Just realize that it will make the changes you want and is as unforgiving as other UNIX commands.

That did it hoghunter. I created .rhosts and now remsh works great.

And by the way, if I could not get this to work, I had already planned to do just what you suggested - a sleeper job on the remote servers waiting for a file to be ftp'ed over. But it could not be cron since this is an on-demand job, so I'm happy to get this working - launch a single job to do it all.

Thanks!