I will be using InfoSphere Warehouse V9.7 running on Red Hat Linux 64 bit. The manual says the following:

On Linux and UNIX systems, a remote shell utility is required for partitioned database systems. DB2 supports the following remote shell utilities:
– rsh
– ssh

By default, DB2 uses rsh when executing commands on remote DB2 nodes, for example, when starting a remote DB2 database partition. To use the DB2 default, the rsh-server package must be installed. For more information about security issues when installing DB2 products, see the Related Links.

If you choose to use the rsh remote shell utility, inetd (or xinetd) must be installed and running as well. If you choose to use the ssh remote shell utility, you need to set the DB2RSHCMD registry variable immediately after the DB2 installation is complete. If this registry variable is not set, rsh is used.

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Anyone have experience using the ssh shell with DPF? Any problems?

You should not have any problems if you configure it using the info in this article:
Configure DB2 Universal Database for UNIX to use OpenSSH