I'm not entirely a newbie - I installed RH 7.1 a couple of years ago and I've been using it regularly since. Installation is my weak point. I've just installed a new RH9.0 and just cannot get the networking to work. I can ping OK but as soon as I try something as fundamental as to telnet to the machine I get a "connection refused" error. Even if I try a local telnet, e.g. telnet localhost, I get this same error.

I've tried setting the security level to a minimum - makes no difference.

I had one or two problems when I installed RH7.1 a couple of years ago and I sorted that out using the ipchains command. Oddly that does not seem to exist on RH9.0

I have tried looking for similar posts and found one on Deja that looked promising which referred to not choosing to defer setting up IPX and NIS options during installation. However, I saw nothing like this during my installation dialogue.

OK, I know I must be doing something fundamentally wrong - but what?

The reason is quite simple: telnet server is not installed by default. That's why you can't access telnet. 'Connection refused' simply means that the machine you're connecting to dosn't offer the service. You can try with ssh or Apache, if you have them installed. The command to run a service is
service servicename start
For example
service sshd start
Then you should be able to connect the machine using ssh (Windows SSH client: Putty)
or
service httpd start
This should start Apache, so when you type your Linux machine's IP into a web browser, you should see Apache default page.

I have reinstalled linux. I checked the group of packages which allegedley includes telnet. When I clicked on Details telnet server was checked. According to the installation log it is installed i.e.

Installing telnet-server-0.17-25

It still behaves the same, i.e.

telnet localhost
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused.

I've tried:

service telnet start
telnet: unrecognised service

What is this service command anyway - it doesn't seem to have a man page. I thought the various servers were started on demand by xinetd.

BTW. I have exactly the same problem with FTP

What do you have in /etc/rc.d/init.d ? Please post output of the 'ls' command.

atotal 248
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2633 Feb 4 2003 aep1000
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 941 Jan 24 2003 anacron
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1458 Feb 24 2003 apmd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1176 Jan 24 2003 atd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9435 Jan 28 2003 autofs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2651 Feb 4 2003 bcm5820
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1316 Feb 19 2003 crond
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2312 Feb 12 2003 cups
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1506 Feb 26 2003 firstboot
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10332 Feb 4 2003 functions
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1541 Jan 29 2003 gpm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5025 Jan 14 2003 halt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2601 Feb 25 2003 httpd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5528 Feb 4 2003 iptables
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1414 Jan 25 2003 irda
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5838 Feb 4 2003 isdn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1084 Mar 6 2003 kdcrotate
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1335 Jan 31 2003 keytable
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 481 Jul 5 2002 killall
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2163 Feb 25 2003 kudzu
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2201 Jan 26 2003 named
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5080 Jan 7 2003 netfs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6784 Feb 4 2003 network
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4522 Jan 25 2003 nfs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2343 Jan 25 2003 nfslock
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2066 Mar 13 2003 nscd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4054 Feb 13 2003 ntpd
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4590 Jan 25 2003 pcmcia
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1898 Feb 24 2003 portmap
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1062 Jan 27 2003 pxe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1516 Jun 26 2002 random
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2246 Jan 7 2003 rawdevices
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1782 Feb 25 2003 rhnsd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1260 Jan 26 2003 saslauthd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2440 Feb 25 2003 sendmail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1175 Jul 10 2002 single
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1928 Mar 14 2003 smb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1575 Feb 11 2003 snmpd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1131 Feb 11 2003 snmptrapd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3225 Jan 25 2003 squid
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2647 Feb 14 2003 sshd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1369 Feb 7 2003 syslog
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2714 Jan 29 2003 tux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2072 Feb 28 2003 vsftpd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1555 Mar 14 2003 winbind
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2576 Feb 27 2003 xfs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2292 Feb 25 2003 xinetd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2501 Jan 25 2003 ypbind
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1638 Jan 25 2003 yppasswdd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1624 Jan 25 2003 ypserv
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1133 Jan 25 2003 ypxfrd

So your telnet server should be run using xinetd. Do you have it running? If not, use 'service xinetd start'.