Running Programs on Non-Chaos Net Hosts

[Barry Margolin <barmar@think.com>]

    Date: Fri, 11 Mar 88 12:48:41 EST
    From: ingria@polaris.bbn.com

    (1) Is it possible to open up a connection to a non-LISPM,
    non-Chaosnet host and run a program on it?  (I can figure out how to
    do this for Chaosnet hosts, but I haven't found a way to do this for
    hosts not on the Chaosnet.)  The machine in question would be running
    UNIX, probably 4.2 BSD.

I've got implementations of the Unix rexec and rsh protocols for the
Lispm.  The rsh implementation, however, depends on enhancements I made
to IP-TCP, because it requires choosing a source port from a particular
range (the rsh protocol uses ports that only privileged programs on Unix
can access instead of requiring a password to be transmitted).

    (2) (1) being possible, is it possible to get the value of the exit
    status ($status) variable set by various progams on the UNIX host?

Even between two Unixes this isn't possible.  However, what you can do
is write a shell script on Unix that executes a command and prints its
exit status, and then use rexec to invoke the script.

                                                barmar