Yes, you need to have networking running to enable telnet.
You don't need to explicitly change runlevel,
Code:
/etc/rc.d/network start
will do it (you may need to change the /etc/rc.d bit; I think Red Hat used to use /etc/rc.d/init.d/ when I used it years ago).
The message
Quote:
INIT: No more processes left.
|
means that it has shut down all the user processes in the particular runlevel; it normally does this when you change runlevels (especially to shutdown or reboot). You should expect the system to start up runlevel 3, enabling networking and firewalls and then bring up system logins again.
The message
Quote:
connect: connection refused
|
can be caused by telnetd or inetd (configured for telnet) not running, depending on which you are using. It can also be caused by the network being down, or the telnet port being blocked by a firewall.