Q: I'm using rdist to do remote software distribution, or to copy files from an optical disk to my hard disk.  But, rdist gives the error "permission denied."  What's wrong?

A: Be sure the machine from which you're doing the rdist is in the .rhosts file of the target machine (this file contains a list of trusted remote hosts).  /.rhosts is consulted if the rdist is being run as root.  In other cases, the .rhosts file in the user's home directory and the hosts.equiv file are consulted, in the same manner as for rcp and rsh.  (Note that hosts.equiv is NOT consulted when the rdist is being run as root.)

QA532

Valid for 1.0, 2.0, 3.0,3.1