Both rug and the Red Carpet graphical update tool, because they use a client/daemon structure, allow you to administer a remote system, provided that it is running rcd and that it allows remote connections.
To perform remote updates, you will need to create accounts with the Red Carpet Daemon, and then use rug with the -h option, which allows you to specify a host. Root privileges are required for account creation, but not for usage.
On the target system, do the following:
Make sure that the remote connection option is enabled:
rug set remote-enabled true
Create an account with a username and password:
rug user-add username privileges
You can specify privileges for the remote user interactively.
If you already have one account on the system, you can add more remotely, with the rather long command:
rug -h hostname.company.com -U your-username useradd new-username
NOTE: The -U flag always refers to your username, not the username of the account you are creating.
Once you have an account on the host system, you can add the -h flag to any rug command, and perform the action on the remote system. For example, to download and install all the updates available for the system at hostname.company.com, use this command:
rug -U username update -y -h hostname.company.com
WARNING: Be sure that you really want to perform the operation before running any command with the -y (yes to all questions) flag. You may wish to perform a dry-run (-N) transaction first, to make sure that the actions are those that you expect.