Ghost in the system
 

I am attempting to bring up a system to act as a gateway to my home/office network. More details on that in another posting but for now I have a problem I just cannot get figure out.

I want to be able to remotely administer my new Linux (Mandrake 8.2) gateway and have installed and configured SSH on both that computer and the W2K Pro workstation I want to work from. Had some problems getting this to work but eventually found the hosts.deny file and commented out the ALL:ALL:DENY line to get it all to work. Everything goes fine but after a short period something reinserts the same line after the commented out line. It's comical, I have deleted this line twice only to have it reappear. I have tried searching for the tool or application that is doing this but I don't have the foundation knowledge that will lead me to it and nothing in the FAQs or forums have helped.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Under Mandrake's silly GUI there's gotta be some system configuration utility, not Linuxconf, Mandrake Control Center strikes me as what it used to be. It'll allow you to "activate" services. This buggy little beast is what must be over-writing your changes with what it thinks should be correct.

Cheers,

Finegan

No GUI installed. Have looked through linuxconf. I figured it was some kind of security maintentance tool that ran in the background.

I picked Mandrake by chance, did I make a mistake here? Is there a better distribution to be used as a server only installation?

Thanks again . . .

Try leaving the hosts.deny file as it originally was. Then check out the man pages for hosts.allow and hosts.deny.

Have you check your root mail for secruity messages?
There is useally a messages about what the various
secruity features check?

If the box you are trying to access it from has a static ip or
real FQDN, you should be able to add a rule to get past it.

Also rumage around in /etc and find out where it's pulling the rewrite from, you might try grep -r "ALL:ALL:DENY" *
in /etc

hm? slightly related question: the hosts.deny file:

is it the same to write:
ALL : ALL
and
ALL : ALL : DENY
in the hosts.deny file?