On Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:15:50 +0100 (BST) (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk allegedly wrote:
Basically, I want *all* the machines on my local LAN to be able to telnet and ftp to each other. Between the older machines (Suse 5.2, Suse 7,2 and red Hat 9) there is no problem.
Ted
I hate to ask, but why? And particularly why telnet. Please consider using ssh and sftp - much, much more secure. OK you could argue that on a closed local network your are minimising your risk, but the fact that you run telnet and ftp daemons across such a wide range of machines by default is inherently insecure (passwords passed in clear for one thing). It is also a good idea to get out of the habit of using these old cleartext protocols.
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.
You will almost certainly find that the debian systems are /not/ running telnet and ftp daemons. This is known as a /jolly good thing/.
If you really want to be able to connect all of your machines each to the the other, then I suggest that you install openssh (client and server) on each machine. Use ssh in place of telnet and sftp in place of ftp. When you have the new daemons running satisfactorily on all machines, then stop the telnetd and ftpd daemons on the older machines. You will probably find that telnetd is run out of inetd.conf (or xinetd) whilst the ftp daemon may be running standalone on the old Suse machines and started by scripts in /etc/init.d or /etc/rc(n).d (I can't remember offhand).
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.
The TCP wrappers files will only apply if the daemons are actually running (and configured to use the wrappers). Changes here will be irrelevant otherwise.
Mick
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The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------