rsh fallback

[Carson Gaspar]

--On Tuesday, April 29, 2003 22:33:05 +1000 Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> 
wrote:

> Colin Watson wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Can anyone remind me of why FallbackToRsh was removed? I've just had a
>> somewhat irate Debian bug report about it, and don't really have enough
>> information to respond properly.
>
> It was pulled out as we didn't think it appropriate for a "secure shell"
> to fall back to an insecure transport.

Sadly, this now means that when trying to convert an rsh shop to ssh, you 
must deploy ssh servers _everywhere_, before you can switch the code to use 
ssh instead of rsh. This creates a logistical nightmare. I _strongly_ agree 
that fallback should not be the default. I'd even be happy with being 
forced to pass an --I_AM_AN_IDIOT_AND_WANT_TO_HAVE_NO_SECURITY flag to ssh 
to get it to fall back (I can shove in in the rsh-alike wrapper script that 
sets ssh up to do host based auth, never prompt for a password, etc.)

A work-around that is mostly working for me is to create a script that 
attempts an ssh, checks the exit code, and tries an rsh if the ssh failed. 
Sadly, this is not perfect, as it is possible for the remote command to 
fail, and for ssh to return an exit code that looks like an ssh failure.

-- 
Carson