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Introduction

RDist is an open source program to maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts. It preserves the owner, group, mode, and mtime of files if possible and can update programs that are executing.

Almost all versions of UNIX include RDist. However, most that do include a very old version sometimes referred to as "4.2BSD rdist", "rdist classic", or "rdist version 3".

Major Features

This version of RDist does not need to be setuid "root" at all. Rdist now uses rsh(1c) (remote command) or ssh(1) program to make connections to remote hosts, instead of making the connection directly. This eliminates the need to be run as "root". (Many thanks to Chris Siebenmann and John DiMarco who came up with an rsh version of rcmd() that makes this possible.)

One of the transports that can be used with RDist is SSH. When used with SSH (see the rdist(1) man page) RDist can perform secure and encrypted updates. If your SSH is compiled with SOCKS support, RDist can perform secure and encrypted updates through SOCKS compliant firewall systems.

RDist now supports automatic system configuration using the GNU autoconf program. This allows RDist to compile on numereous Unix/Linux based systems.

See the CHANGES file for the real details.

A paper titled Overhauling Rdist for the '90s from the USENIX LISA VI conference is available. This paper describes in significant detail the differences and benefits in the new RDist.

Documentation

The following man pages are available:

• rdist(1) - Command Line Interface
• rdistd(1) - Remote Server

Supported Platforms

This version of RDist has been ported to most major, and a number of not so major, UNIX/Linux platforms. See the Release Notes for details.

Compatibility

This version of RDist differs greatly from older versions (as distributed with 4.3BSD) in that the client and the server portions are seperated into two distinct programs, rdist and rdistd, respectively. The protocol used to communicate between the client and server has also been extensively modified. These changes make providing "builtin" compatibility very difficult. However, backwards compatibility is possible, provided you have a binary or source copy of the old RDist.

The way the old RDist started a server RDist is to run "rdist -Server". If the new RDist is run with the "-Server" option, then it will exec a copy of the old RDist (usually /usr/old/rdist or /usr/ucb/oldrdist). In this way, you get compatibility with hosts running the old RDist attempting to RDist to a machine running new RDist. If your host running new RDist wants to RDist to a host running the old RDist, then it must run the old RDist program (/usr/old/rdist or /usr/ucb/oldrdist).

The definition _PATH_OLDRDIST in "config/config.h" controls the location of the old RDist. If this is not defined, or the defined program does not exist at runtime, then RDist will print an error when run with the "-Server" option.

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Installation

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License

RDist is distributed under a BSD open source license. The license is available by clicking here.

Year 2000 Status

No version of RDist is known to have any Year 2000 problems. There is virtually no date related code in RDist and the little that exists doesn't deal with parsing date strings such as MM/DD/YY. Having said that, we must emphasize that we do not provide any kind of warranty or guarentee.

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