I am running mandrake 8.0. At the moment, I am trying to administer the linux machine from other clients on the network via ssh, ftp etc. I have portsentry installed. The problem I have at the moment is that the machine I use always gets denied i.e. the ip number always appears in the hosts.deny file. I remove it and it works fine, but after a while ssh, telnet and ftp stop working, I check the hosts.deny file and there it is again?

Does anyone have any ideas?

Mandrake has a security feature called msec. Basically you set a security level and it runs a cron job that checks your system and changes anything that doesn't match the config.

It's a great idea when you know about it and have configured it but out of the box it can really screw you up. I had a problem for a while that my 3d drivers would just stop working after a few days. Turned out that msec was changing the permissions on the config file and iy couldn't be read.

I can't guarantee that msec is your problem but it's a good place to start looking.

TL