Hello. I am trying to make a complete checklist of
everything that is needed to telnet or ftp oneself.
While doing that may seem silly, the idea is that
when unsuccessful in telnetting or ftping from a
remote location, the network should probably not be
incriminated if the operation cannot be done on a
LOCAL basis (because something has been forgotten).
I am personally using Mandrake 8.0, and have that
problem. Here are the points I checked :
1. Am I root ? Yes. I learned that for security reasons
root does not allow direct telnet connection. That
seems reasonable, so from now on I shall try to connect
as a regular user, say "bob", defined for that purpose.
All system enquiries will still be made from a "root"
window, of course.
2. Is bob's shell /bin/bash ? Yes. (A restricted shell
would probably not be a good thing here).
3. Is xinetd running (ps -ef | grep inet) ? Yes.
4. Is localhost (127.0.0.1) defined in /etc/hosts.allow ?
Yes. Both under localhost name (defined in /etc/hosts)
and dotted notation, just in case.
5. Is /etc/hosts.allow writable only by root ? Yes (some
systems consider it unreliable if writable by anybody
else).
6. Is localhost absent of /etc/hosts.deny ? Yes
7. If anything above has been modified in order to grant
access, stop and restart xinetd.
Is this unsufficient ? Having done all that, I am still
unable to telnet myself, so I guess something is STILL
missing, but I just don't know what. Any idea ? Thanks
in advance
)
