Using HP-UX Internet Services (August 2003)

Distributing Files Using rdist

Overview

Chapter 5 37

Overview

rdist facilitates maintaining of identical copies of ﬁles over multiple

hosts. It preserves the owner, group, mode and modiﬁcation time of the

ﬁle and can also update programs that are executing.

To use rdist, you must designate one system in the network as the

master host. The master host contains the master copy of the source

ﬁles that are distributed to remote hosts.

The rdist software is installed as part of the operating system. It must

reside in the /usr/bin directory on the master host and on the remote

hosts that are to be updated. The directory must be owned by the root

and must have its access permissions set to rwsr-xr-x. The rdist

process on the master host starts an rdist process on each remote host.

rdist uses remsh as the mechanism for distributing ﬁles over the

network. To use rdist, you must set up remsh on all the remote hosts.

See “Setting Up remsh” on page 39 for more information.

A ﬁle on a remote host is updated if the size or modiﬁcation time of the

ﬁle differs from the master copy. Programs that are being executed on

the remote host can also be updated. The next time the program is run,

the new version of the program is executed. The owner, group, mode, and

modiﬁcation time of the ﬁles on the master host are preserved on the

remote host. The ownership of the ﬁles is preserved only if the remote

user is a superuser. Otherwise, the ﬁles are owned by the remote user.

Command-line options are provided to control this behavior.

By default, the list of ﬁles updated on each remote host is printed to the

standard output on the master host. You can also mail the list of updated

ﬁles for a particular remote host to a speciﬁed mail recipient.