Ok here is the situation.
My employer has me in a Unix shell all day. With this in mind they don’t want me “Experimenting” in there production environment. I believe I can write a few scripts to help me in my daily work activities, but need a platform at home to test it out. I plan on writing a few c-shell scripts in the Linux command shell and then when ready move them to my work environment.

This being said, I have played with Red hat 9 and have a book to explain most questions. However I have decided to try a newer version of Linux (Ubuntu-server) but have run into a problem. I can neither enable telnet (so I can login from my laptop to my old old old desktop) nor enable SSH (Evidently Neither are enabled by default when you load the os fresh).

Now YES I understand that ‘Telnet’ is a old un-secure protocal, but for this instance it will suffice. (No critical data is on this old pc, and even if someone hacked into it, it would most likely hold little or no interest for them.) I cant seem to find the xinet.d dot or the inetd.conf file to enable it. Knowing that SSH was another alternative, I tried it and was not able to connect In both cases my client told me “connection refused”.

Can someone please help me fix this? Possibly a url or an old post. I have downloaded open-bsd (a .gz file) but at the moment I am drawing a blank..

Thanks

C.

well firstly SSH is nearly always enabled by default, on any modern distro, whilst telnet is not installed at all. i expect you've got a firewall also enabled by defualt which is blocking the access. just check your firewall settings, open port 22 in the gui for it and off you go with telnet. if you do want to install telnet then run "apt-get install telnetd" and that will install a telnet server assuing your internet connection is running fine. also then presumably need to open port 23 for telnet as above.

not as you know telnet sucks the big one, but even more so from your perspective, as with a suitably set up enviroment, ssh can make your job actively a lot easier... set up ssh rsa keys and connect instantly to your box securely without requiring a password, instantly use scp and sftp within the ssh server... map drives over sftp... lots of funky ways ssh makes your life much nicer in a semi automated world compared to telnet.

Ok I have tried loading the guy (startx as I recall) but that is a no go, tried init 5 but nothing happens. Is there a way to modify the firewall at the command line? I.E. no GUI.

Thanks

C.

according to google, running "sudo ubuntu-firewall stop" will stop the firewall temporarily... should easily be able to see if that makes a difference.

Ubuntu server doesn't come with a gui

oh really? never knew that... nice / brave move on their part. i wish redhat would follow suit! would make the muppets in my office actually learn something.