Help with Telnet
 

Hello all. I will begin by saying I am just learning Linux, so any help that could be given would be greatly appreciated.

I just loaded SuSE 7.3 on an older system of mine. It runs great. KDE is a little slow, but overall it runs well.

I have a few books concerning networking with Linux, setting up security measures, etc.

I want to run Telnet on the Linux box, yet for some reason it is not working.

It is enabled in the inetd file and the services file in /etc.

I try to log into it from a Windows XP box on my network, and it says the server actively refused the connection. So I know the service is running, just not sure why it refuses me.

What am I doing wrong? My assumption is I need to set up an IP address (of the computer trying to log in) somewhere in another file, yet I am not sure which one, and the books are not very forthcoming. Any ideas?

Thanks for the help! :)

Are you trying to login as root or a regular user ? root is disabled and that would be dangerous anyways as telnet is unsecure. You may want to look into ssh, which is far more secure in this type of connection. Let us know !

Also it could very well be a firewall if that was setup with your install ??

Thanks for the quick reply!


I know it is unsecure... I picked that up in some of my readings. However, this box is behind a router, and the computer I am trying to connect from is also behind the router. Even if someone knew I was running a telnet server behind this router, I don't think they could do much with it since no ports are forwarded.

Tell me if I am mistaken here. :confused:


I ran this command from a prompt in WinXP

telnet 192.168.1.3

Obviously that is the IP address of the Linux box behind my router...

When I ran that it more or less said it saw me trying to connect, but actively refused it. It never gave me a chance to login.

Any ideas?

what distro?

It is SuSE 7.3

Is that what you are asking?

Geez I am a newbie. :cry:

Ye s I was asking that.
Did you install a default firewall?

before reconfiguring everything...
PuTTY is a free ssh implementation for windoze. It's small and easy to use. try it with ssh before opening up telnet.

To my knowledge, the firewall is disabled. It says so when the box boots up.

I will try that program. Thanks!

I would still like to know why telnet is not working though. Fixing problems is a good way to learn, even though I am pretty stuck right now.

I was reading something about the hosts.allow file. That might be a little off, but the idea is the same. Do I need to add the IP address of my XP box in there?

/sbin/chkconfig --list

telnet: off

it should be near the bottm with the xinetd services. is tit off or on?

as for hosts.allow
and
hosts.deny

The only thing I've ever used them for is NFS
but I'm no guru