Adding R* to Windows NT

Robert Flannigan

Adding Windows NT servers to an existing UNIX or heterogeneous environment does not necessarily mean giving up familiar distributed computing tools used by UNIX administrators. With a minimal investment in an NFS package for Windows NT and adding the free RSHSVC included in the Windows NT Resource Kit from Microsoft, system managers can leverage their existing knowledge of the Berkeley "R" command family (rsh or remsh in particular) to make Windows NT a bit more UNIX-friendly. Access to UNIX and other legacy data and the ability to coordinate processing between UNIX and NT allows automation of tasks by stringing together UNIX processes with NT batch files, executables, or any other non-interactive scripts that can be executed by Windows NT. By using this method my employer, Jacobson Stores, has achieved a reliable decision support database batch update of daily sales information from mainframe and UNIX transactions that are processed into "cleansed" files by UNIX systems, then ultimately loaded in parallel to their final destination of an ESSBASE database engine running under Windows NT server. This tight coupling of the two operating systems can be a cost-effective way of integrating two very different computing platforms.

Security Issues

As with installing other services such as ftp, activating RSHSVC on a particular machine will inherently weaken built-in security and is not recommended for any system that is connected to an untrusted network, acting as a firewall, bastion host, or aspiring to achieve C2 level security. Inside a properly configured firewall (one not accepting connections to SHELL / EXEC TCP ports) or any other relatively secure corporate intranet, the benefits of having the service available usually outweigh the perceived risks.<>