Folks,

I had Redhat 6.1 and just got hacked. I want to use it for a webserver. I had telnet and ftp open so the developers for the website could put there stuff on there. I didn't get the warm and fuzzy's about that and apparantly I had good reason.

I didn't have any of the goodstuff on there and am pretty new to admin and don't really want to become an expert .

I would like a suggestion on where to go from here. Should I just go for 7.X, the latest and greatest.

I want to run PHP, Apache webserver and Oracle 8.1, at least the client.

Thoughts????

mark lightner
a recently hacked student of "THE GAME"

It is virtually impossible to have the perfect warm fuzzy feeling about your system. The best thing you can try to do is setup a firewall and possibly change the ports that you use for ftp. You can also try using ssh instead of telnet. Iptables is supposed to be a little more secure than ipchains, but it is newer so it can be a little harder to find documentation on it.

As a side note, www.grc.com is a site that can port scan your computer and will let you know if the "standard" port are open or what when a port scan is done on your computer.


Goodluck.

definitely use ssh instead of telnet.. that could have been the door left open as its not secure in any means. also definitely look into a firewall.

-trickykid

Folks,

I don't really need telnet or ftp that often.

The question that I am looking to answer is what I should do for linux. Should I just reinstall RedHat 6.1 or go to 7.1?

Thanks !!!!

Mark

Dude, by now you kinda off your rocker me thinks, you don't have to post your question trice, we know after the second post it's important to you :-]

Stick with Redhat and become an expert.

The decision you should make is whether you know 6.1 well enough that you don't want to have to relearn somehting new or if you want to use the firewall scripts that most people are putting up for use/examples that use iptables then you should go ahead and upgrade to at least 7.1. You should also upgrade to the newest kernel if you upgrade to 7.1 and get at least vs 1.2.4 of iptables.

I used to have 6.2 but upgraded to 7.x because I found iptables to more flexible. I can do a lot more with iptables than ipchains, plus it's less administration with iptables. Just my 2 cents!