On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 22:15 +0100, Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
... But I've had a Debian Etch running now for about 18 months, and recently a Debian Lenny (provisional installation), and both of these deny attempts to telnet or ftp into them from the others ("connection refused"). However, I can of course telnet and ftp from either of these to any of the older machines.
I have put ALL: ALL in the /etc/hosts.allow file (like in the older machines), but this does not seem to make any difference.
I get the impression that access control has changed in some fundamental way, but I can't put my finger on it!
The message "connection refused" is easily misinterpreted as something to do with access control but it does not mean "access denied".
It means the kernel refused to accept the TCP connection because there is nothing listening on the port specified by the client, i.e. because the server daemon is not running.
These daemons do not run by default on Debian. If you want them you can install them and then configure them but openssh is more secure.
Regards, Steve.