rcp doesn't work because of my UIDs?

Andrew DeFaria Andrew@DeFaria.com
Tue Jul 31 14:46:00 GMT 2007


Li_Adrian@emc.com wrote:
> Here's my current situation:
> I use PuTTY to access a UNIX box from my Windows box,
Hmm... You have Cygwin. Why not just use ssh? (Never understood why 
people want to get, install, configure and maintain multiple small 
Unix-like solutions like PuTTY and various commercial X servers like 
Reflection/X (especially since they may or may not play well together) 
when Cygwin has all of that already and it's much more Unix-like...)
> and I want to be able to rcp from that UNIX box onto a Windows 2003 
> Server box, with Cygwin as it's porting system to UNIX.
Can you rsh from the Unix box to the Windows 2003 box? How about ssh? 
(<- Note some configuration may be required).
> All RPC commands work, but when I use rcp,
What are "RPC commands"? Did you mean the "r" commands like rsh, rlogin, 
rcp, etc.?
> I have to do it in the format of rcp test.txt 
> username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/ and I have to find some way to be able 
> to drop that username part.
The way to drop the username part is to use the same username at both ends.
> So after talking to another person on the mailing list, we determined 
> that I can't rcp using just the host's IP because of the difference in 
> UIDs. When I found the UIDs of the computers, I found the UNIX UID to 
> be 0, and Windows UID to be 500. Do you guys think that this is the 
> cause? If so, how do I fix it?
Let's not start complicating matters by using root (UID 0) access on the 
Unix side. First try to get rsh access going between the two machines 
using your user ID. Or better yet set up ssh and get that working. ssh, 
unlike rsh, will prompt you for a password if necessary while rsh (rcp, 
etc) will just fail with an error message unless you've configured 
passwordless access. Not that passwordless access isn't possible, rather 
you might think that having one user masquerade as another would be the 
hardest to configure, especially when one of those users is a super user 
(UID 0). So again, let's not start with the most difficult configuration 
first!

Once you can [rs]sh between the two systems try the [rs]cp again, with 
the username being the same, thus not specified, then, if you must, try 
it with differing usernames. Again, scp will probably be better because 
if necessary it should prompt for a password though configuration of 
ssh/scp is more difficult, especially with 2003 Windows machines as they 
have tightened up security requirements. See the OpenSSH readme when you 
install OpenSSH in cygwin and look for set up scripts of ssh-host-config 
and ssh-user-config.

Finally, for an alternate solution(s), if all you're really doing is 
copying files from a Unix system to a Windows system have you considered 
making the file system on the Unix side a share by setting up Samba? 
Then you can:

    $ cp //unixsvr/share/path/file /cygdrive/c/Windows

or (shrudder), simply have the application your running that needs these 
files access //unixsvr/share/path/file(s) (<- for any Cygwin 
programs/scripts or \\unixsvr\share\path\files(s) for Windows only 
programs...)
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
One nice thing about egoists: They don't talk about other people.


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