openpbs hosts.equiv workaround?

[jribnik]

In order to submit jobs with qsub from client machines to the openpbs server the machine running the server requires hosts.equiv

Is anyone aware of a means to circumvent hosts.equiv?

All clients and server share passwd, shadow and group files, and the clients' /home is nfs exported from the server.

The necessity of hosts.equiv seems strange considering openpbs already uses ssh to transmit files.