Hi!

I'm using Mandrake 7.2, full install, and I can't seem to telnet into my system, even using localhost. I get an error message that says, basically, Connection Accepted, Escape Character..., Connection closed.

My telnet is uncommented in my /etc/inetd.conf. Any thoughs?

Take a look in your hosts.deny file if I remember right they put a line or two in there that bans pretty much everyone!

my /etc/hosts.deny file is empty. any other thoughts?

I'd have to look more into it.... You could look in your inetd.conf file and figure out what it runs to start the telnet daemon and then try to do that manually and see if it is actually starting. Another option (and the one that I would go with) is to install SSH on the system. The first thing I do to a system that I want to keep somewhat secure is disable FTP and telnet and then install SSH on the system. This is like FTP and Telnet with encryption between you and the server. One of the main reasons I do this is because I am on a very heavily populated LAN (in a college dorm at an Engineering Technical School) and the plain text password transmission techniques used by FTP and Telnet are just unacceptable.

I don't know that much about Mandrake I've only seen a friend of mine operate it for a few minutes! Just long enough to go hrm.. It looks like RedHat and then move on in my life!

Hope this helps....

Hey,

Actually when I checked my /var/log/secure after trying to telnet in, I discovered that telnetd was never installed. Odd. Anyways, I agree with you about SSH. I've installed SSH2, but I'm not sure how to start up sshd2. I've checked their web site but couldn't find anything. Any hints?

sshd2 in the /usr/local/sbin directory is the executable to start the daemon and I just added a few lines that say:

#########START SSHD
/usr/local/sbin/sshd2

into /etc/rc.d/rc.local file (at the bottom) so that I didn't have to start it manually again if the system was rebooted. It will just load on boot. Then after that its all installed and running. Keep in mind you have to have an SSH client to connect to it!

Thanks for the tip. That worked.

The only problem I have with using ssh is that I have to type the full path to it, ie: /usr/local/bin/ssh2 to get it to start. How can I make it so that I can just type "ssh2" from my home directory?

Thanks again for all your help!

Well you can either just go to your home folder and type ./sshd2 which actually means <current folder>/sshd2 or you can go to your homefolder and edit the file .bash_profile (you wont be able to see it unless you do an ls -a) a means all! Then you can add ./ into your path statement. Remember that these path entries are separated by Colons ( : ) not semi colons like Windozes'.

This should help ya out!