hostbased authentication and the root account

[rene.klootwijk at nl.abnamro.com]

We have a problem using hostbased authentication in combination with the
root account. We use hostbased authentication to hop from a 'management
server' where we use strong authentication to several systems in a cluster.
The management server is defined in shosts.equiv and the public key of this
server is defined in ssh_known_hosts. This setup works for all users except
for the root user (which is needed for maintenance scripts to work). We've
got it working for the root account by specifying the management server in
the /root/.shosts file and setting the IgnoreRhosts option to no. This is
not what we want, we want to ignore user specific shost files, so setting
the IgnoreRhosts option to yes. In the source of auth-rhosts.c, line 205,
an if statement specifies that the central shosts.equiv file is only
checked for accounts other than root. Why is this?

Regards,
Rene
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