Help with port 22
 

Hello, I'm a newbie to RHEL 5. I'm have an outside tech to configure some programs for me but he wants me open port 22 and find out the password, How do I do that? Thanks in advance.

Not knowing anything about your setup, or abilities, we'll start slowly. (the outside tech can't help you here?)

Do you have a firewall/router between your ISP and the box?
Do you have iptables and/or SELinux running on the box?

1) sshd has to be running
2) you need to create an account for the user and give the user the username/password
3) you may need to configure /etc/sudoers to give elevated permissions for operations that require root access

Its hard to give more advice since there's not enough here to go on. We don't know what the tech can/can't do, or is going to do.

edit your firewall and allow 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22. or if you know the IP block of the person going in just allow his network. the password he's asking is the root password of your server.

reply
 

I do have a router with firewall (linksys), and I believe Selinux is running. When I check which ports are open 22 is one of them. So if I just create a user/password for the tech he should be able to access my server from a remote location? Thanks for the advice

Not necessarily.

1. Your router probably needs to forward incoming port 22 traffic to the IP address of your machine.
2. You may have to adjust firewall rules to allow the incoming connection.
3. You may have to create an account for him as recommended earlier in the thread - the sshd_config in some distros does not allow root log in. In your case, that's probably the correct thing to do.

Be advised that opening port 22 to a system with an active sshd guarantees that your system will be probed with brute force break in attempts frequently. Use good passwords.

reply2
 

After I configure the router to forward to port 22, What would be the password he is looking for to access the system, let me post on what his directions are: Please download a copy of the 32 bit ISO, the current one is 1.2, and install it.When you are done, please open up port 22, and send me the password for the system, so I can build and configure A2Billing. When that is done, we can start with the familiarisation.

adduser or useradd and *create* an account for the user. You select the username and password. Then you give it to him/her.

Don't enable root login via ssh - its not necessary here, and is a risk (somehow I get the feeling you will use a very guessable password).

You can give the root password to the tech, or your username/password, or configure sudo as I mentioned.