The most notable new feature of rdistis that it is broken into two separate programs: a client and a server.
The client portion uses
rcmd(TC)
to bind to a privileged TCP/IP port so it can communicate with the
rshd(ADMN)
network server in order to execute a noninteractive shell on a remote
machine. Therefore it must be run as root.
In addition, rdist allows you to:
perform parallel remote file distributions by specifying how
many simultaneous rdist processes should run on the command line.
This feature helps accelerate the updating of many files on many hosts.
execute a command after all the files have been distributed using
cmdspecial.
perform enhanced logging, including the ability to use
syslog(SLIB),
to a file.
work with older versions of rdist by executing
the original rdist program (now called
ordist(TC)).