Funnily enough, I was trying to get this exact thing working today. The trick it seems, is that you need to have both rshd and rlogind running. Here's a step by step which will allow you to get root to rsh into localhost from localhost. Expanding this should be easy enough with a little reading. Refer to the rsh, rlogin, rcmd and .rhosts manual pages. Good luck.
- download Lingon from sourceforge
- fire it up and open the "shell" plist from the System Daemons list.
- check the enable checkbox
- save the plist
- open the "login" plist from the System Daemons list.
- check the enable checkbox
- save the plist
- open a terminal window
- run $ sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/shell.plist
- run $ sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/login.plist
- run $ sudo launchctl list | egrep "rsh|login"
- you will see something like this when they are loaded:
$ sudo launchctl list | egrep "rsh|login" - 0 com.apple.rlogind - 0 com.apple.rshd $
- run $ sudo launchctl start com.apple.rshd
- run $ sudo launchctl start com.apple.rlogind
- run $ sudo launchctl list | egrep "rsh|rlogin"
- you will see something like this when it's started (loading and starting are two separate things. If you load but don't start, it won't work. You'll know when they are started, because the number in the first column will NOT be zero if the processes are properly started. 0 means they are loaded, >0 means they are started):
$ sudo launchctl list | egrep "rsh|login" 608 - com.apple.rlogind 604 - com.apple.rshd $
- run sudo su (don't ask me why, but you cannot sudo the below command, you have to be su to run it, hence the sudo su).
- run 'echo "localhost root" >> /etc/hosts.equiv'
- run rsh localhost - and voila:
$ rsh localhost
Last login: Tue Jan 8 23:21:04 on ttys000
bash$
