Hello everyone.

I currently have my older Slackware 9.0 box setup to deny all SSHD traffic according to hosts.deny and allow only those who have been specified in hosts.allow. To my knowledge this functionality came right from the CD.

I am trying to set this up now on our 10.0 box, but it doesn't appear that it works that way anymore. I have compared the sshd_config files and even the rc.sshd startup files and can't find anything different that would suggest why I can't do this any more.

Does anyone know how to reactivate this functionality or do it better in 10.0? I checked out some of the hardening guides listed for various other problems but they all basically show how I'm doing in 9.0.

Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated a head of time. Thanks.
-Smillie

Did you comment the auth line in /etc/inetd.conf, if yes try uncomment it and run
killall -HUP inetd

Any error in logs ? (/var/log/syslog...)

Currently auth is uncommented in inetd.conf and I have nothing sshd related in my syslog except for this:

Mar 8 19:11:07 gator sshd[4487]: fatal: Timeout before authentication for 10.0.22.163.

Which I added LoginGraceTime as 15 so I think that is what the above is about.

-Smillie

Is it the sshd deamon that come with slackware 10.0 (openssh package 3.8.1pl) ?

Yes.
-Smillie

No errors in /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure ?
As from these infos...
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...rs-access.html
...any error in configs should be logged

There were issues with old version of udev and ssh though, do you run 2.6 kernel ?

I am running 2.6.7 Kernel.

I can't find any warning messages or other sshd related messages which are bad currently in secure or message. Everything is more or less "Accepted This and that."

When I put a new entry in hosts.deny it does apply to everything else but ssh. Like to test I have listed the IP of my OSX machine to deny all. From that point forward it can't connect to pop3 or FTP so I beleive the files themself are configured soundly. Unfortunately it can still connect through SSH.
-Smillie

I just dug out another one of my servers I've been waiting to bring back into service which also runs 10.0 and tested for the same issues. It works right so I'm guess it has to be something I have done. Since you pointed out the kernel, could it be possible I didn't compile something into my existing kernel for this to work properly?
-Smillie

No I mean it could be an udev thing as some reported ssh problems with one udev version
some time ago, maybe you should try upgrade udev to see

Will try tomorrow and will post back. Again thanks for helping me through this.
-Smillie

OK I finally got everyone off the server (Spring Break has a lot to do with that) and I used swaret to update my server. Open-SSH was one of the updates and now all is well and working properly.

Again thanks for all the assistance above!:>
-Smillie