Hi,

I am getting connection refused when I try to ssh to
RedHat 9.0 Linux installation on IBM xServer 335. Both
machines are inside the firewall.

I did a medium security installation and expected ssh
to work by default. I checked sshd is running. On the IBM
machine I can ssh to itself successfully. From IBM, I can
also browse the web, so I can see outside network. I tried
adding ssd: ALL to /etc/hosts.allow but it didn't make
any difference. From my machine, I can ping the IBM xServer.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Rakesh

there will be an ssh log file in there somewhere... maybe you're trying to do it as root or something? find the log file and it should be pretty obvious. you've given us very little info to go on though....

All sshd related messages in /var/log attached:
[root@eeyore log]# grep sshd * | grep 13
boot.log:Nov 13 10:34:57 eeyore sshd: sshd -TERM succeeded
boot.log:Nov 13 10:36:53 eeyore sshd: succeeded
messages:Nov 13 10:34:57 eeyore sshd: sshd -TERM succeeded
messages:Nov 13 10:36:53 eeyore sshd: succeeded
secure:Nov 13 10:34:57 eeyore sshd[1767]: Received signal 15; terminating.
secure:Nov 13 10:36:53 eeyore sshd[1769]: Server listening on 0.0.0.0 port 22.

on the remote host trying to connect it says:
ssh: connect to address 192.168.19.51 port 22: Connection refused

Sounds like iptables (or ipchains) isn't allowing connections on port 22. A quick and dirty way to check in to type "/sbin/service iptables stop" as root then try to connect by SSH. This should flush all the chains and reset to the default accept policy. "iptables -L" will list all the active chains.

Here is a HOWTO for ipchains which pretty well applies to iptables too.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IPCHAINS-HOWTO.html

disabling the firewall fixed the problem as you pointed out. Thanks!

Rakesh