Get out your platform shoes. I know people that use rsh to fire up processes on trusted remote machines this way (e.g. think 1000s of machines connected on a private network). It gets around some authentication overhead, encryption, and having to set things up in something like inetd on each machine (esp if you aren't the admin and politics rule). Sadly, since scaling configuration and performance does become an issue to them, using rsh becomes a very tempting, easy way...