I recently setup cygwin on a Windows 2008 server, and when I tried to issue an rsh command, the rshd process was returning a NULL to the rsh client. It turned out that I had several copies of inetd running. Some I had started using cygrunsrv – and others using iu-config.
After killing all the copies of inetd, and starting a new one using cygrunsrv – everything was OK.
The key is to not run cygrunsrv, before setting up the cywgin “user” using iu-config – otherwise you end up with an inetd process owned by SYSTEM, and that – it seems is bad. When all is working, my ps -ef looks like this, where the user cyg_srv is the user setup during iu-config.
$ ps -ef
UID PID PPID TTY STIME COMMAND
Administ 3948 1 con 17:52:52 /usr/bin/bash
cyg_serv 3492 1 ? 17:55:22 /usr/bin/cygrunsrv
cyg_serv 3652 3492 ? 17:55:22 /usr/sbin/inetd
Administ 1308 3948 con 17:59:49 /usr/bin/ps