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3. Special accounts for remote administration and cluster management

Linuxconf use special protocols to perform remote administration and cluster management. Those protocols may be encapsulated easily to enhance either conectivity and security.

One nice encapsulating tool is ssh (secure shell). ssh is a great replacement for commands like rlogin, rsh, rcp and telnet. It does basically the same thing (and more), but add strong encryption and compression.

ssh is also very useful just to interconnect two process remotly, by providing a secure (encrypted) link. This is the way linuxconf is using it.

By setting special account on workstations and servers, you will be able to use that with linuxconf without even knowing. This is experimental and comments are welcome.

3.1 How to setup a host for remote administration

Linuxconf uses ssh to establish the link. It expect that a special user account "remadmin" do exist on the remote host. This user account must have the shell

        /usr/lib/linuxconf/lib/remadminshell
        

The account must NOT have a password. The idea is to trigger linuxconf immediatly, which will request a password using its GUI protocol.

You can use ssh access control to limit who may access you box this way. They need the root password nevertheless to access it.


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