I have a redhat 7.3 server that I have problems accessing
with telnet and trying to set up as a Samba Server. The server is also a webserver and resides behind a router as a fire walll as does the rest of my network. As I have done on
other redhat servers, I turned off ipchains and turned on iptables. I can secure shell login from anywhere inside my
network. When I telnet, I get connection refused. I then tried allowing everything through. I stopped and cleared out all the iptables entries. I restarted iptables andentered the following commands with no error messages:

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

I still get connection refused. When I enter:

iptables -L

it shows that these are the only policies and they are entered correctly. Any ideas?

Maybe a stupid question, but you have telnetd running?
What do the logs say (PAM|TCP wrappers/xinetd thing?)?

I thought I did. I went into the services configuration and made sure xinetd was running (which it says is required for telnet). I double checked with ps -ef | grep xinetd and saw that it really was. telnet was checked to start at start up. The commands to start and stop the service were grayed out. I couldn't do it from the tool. Telnet it self runs from the command line on the server buts gets a connection refused message when I telnet out to any other server. I am a newbie. How do I check the logs?

xinetd running does not mean telnet is running....

Have a look in /etc/xinetd.d for a file called telnet, edit it and change the line that reads

disable yes

to

disable no

save the file and restart xinetd /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

hth

I checked that the entry in the file in the
/etc/xinetd.d/telnet

was:

dasable no

I did an

/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

iIt gave me the okay message on shutting down and restarting the service. I still have the same problem. Attempts to telnet to the server get connection refused.
Secure shell logins work just fine.

What do I try next

What about your tcpwrappers? /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny ?

I just checked. No entries in either the hosts.allow or
hosts.deny files. I just tried adding the entry
ALL: ALL

like i have in an old slackware box. It didn't work

When you restarted xinetd, flushed iptables, etc, etc; what computer are you trying to connect in from?

While on the server you are trying to telnet into, can you type:

# telnet localhost

telnet to localhost works

I have tried connecting in from a couple of PCs running Windows 2000 and a couple of other Linux and SCO Unixware boxes on my local network. All have IP addresses in the same 192.168.1.* range. All have entries in the servers hosts file.