What should be in my hosts.allow file and what format should it be in eg. 192.168.1.6 mycomputername?

What does this file actually do?

I want to be able to receive mail from my linux red hat 8 box using outlook 2002 email client on a windows 2000 workstation which is on the lan

thanks again

Usually its in this format:

service: hostname: options

Basically its a way to allow particular hosts to perform certain services on your machine.

Say for instance if you wanted machineA with IP or 192.168.1.200 to be able to telnet on your machine you would have something like this:

in.telnetd: 192.168.1.200 : ALLOW

Or you can specify a whole domain if you wanted like:

in.telnetd: some-domain.org : ALLOW

This will probably lead to what does host.deny do, well, its just the opposite of basically this file does. You can deny certain hosts from services on your machine.

Hope this helps you understand a bit more about that file.

thanks trickykid, it does help

so, what would ipop3 be: in.ipop3d: 192.168.1.200 : ALLOW ??

thanks again

What distro do you use Tigger?

sorry, what do yu mean by distro? Do you mean red hat 8.0 server?

in.ipop3d: 192.168.1.200 : ALLOW
Syntax is <daemon>: <address|ranges listing>: <action>.
What you could do is read "man 5 hosts_access" first, because it gives a good description of what Libwrap/TCP Wrappers (that's /etc/hosts.{allow,deny} do.

ok, thanks for that

This is of great help to me.