[KLUG Members] remotely spawning a process without interaction

[John Pesce]

I have a legacy control application that spawns applications on remote
systems as part of a distributed simulation. It uses rsh to issue ps
commands to tell if the processes are running and rsh to spawn the
processes to begin with. to accomplish this each system has the name of
the control server in its hosts.equiv file so that it doesn't require a
password.

Now that I'm upgrading everything from Rh8.x to Suse 9.2 it is more
secure by default. Is there a way I can still remotely spawn the apps
and check if they are running without all the computers running rsh
servers and being open to any command without a password.

I was thinking maybe ssh or something similar. Maybe a list of
applications that can be started without a password? Or maybe maybe only
having to login once?