Secure rdist?

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

[Please Cc: me with replies!]

I know it must be an FAQ, but does there exist a secure replacement
for rdist, one which would not require having a /root/.rhosts file?
Those things make me understandably paranoid.  I'm not quite sure what
a secure replacement would look like though; would it perhaps use the
SSH protocol with some more secure automatic authentication?

Thanks

   Julian

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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg