The remote access tools such as rlogin, to login remotely, and rsh, to execute commands on a remote system, are handy. For instance, with rlogin, if your username is the same on the remote machine as it is on the local machine, you don't have to provide your username and password.
However, the very simplicity of the rlogin and rsh commands makes them security risks. If you're concerned about the security of your Unix box, you'll want to disable these.
Disable both rlogin and rsh by commenting out their entries in inetd.conf or xinetd.conf, depending on which your system is running.
-- SP
Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.