[plug] telnet on Mandrake

[Christian]

Willaim Kenworthy wrote:
> 
> Hi Christian,
>     ftp works, telnet doesnt.  To me there is something odd as I do not think there
> is much of a risk with either, on a home network on the inside.  Its left me in the
> lurch as when kde totally locks up (three times now), I cannot telnet in and see
> whats wrong - have to reset as cannot even switch consoles.  Also my son uses (would
> like to go back to using) the box via telnet session from another room - his stuff
> is set up as command line, so telnet is important to at least to this home user, and
> I would think to any experianced home user.  Please dont look on all use of a
> computer from a sysadmins point of view (the only correct way to use  a computer is
> powered off so users cannot get up to any mischief!), there are other valid uses
> that require relatively open access to be usable.  I agree that leaving networking
> features disabled by default is sensible, but why telnet and not ftp. Also the
> Mandrake setup and I think RedHat ask "Do you want networking" as part of the
> install - it makes sence that if I want networking installed, I want to be able to
> use it, not have to turn on each feature one by one - unless linux conf can add them
> to its deamon control panel which is an excellent idea.

For a start I think everyone should be using ssh and NOT telnet wherever
possible.  As for telnet being useful to home users, yes I think you're
right that it can be -- I just think most of the time it isn't.  Most
home users don't have their own internal networks and most have
dynamically assigned IP addresses from their ISPs which makes it tricky
(although, of course, not impossible) to telnet into their machines from
somewhere else.  Therefore, it makes sense to disable both telnet and
ftp during install for these users.  Of course, in this case it appears
that telnet wasn't intentionally disabled, just the server wasn't
installed which is either a bug in Mandrake or it somehow was ommitted
during install (I'm not familiar with Mandrake's package structure so I
don't know if this is possible or not).

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
Five years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS,
64M SPARCstation-5.
			      - Andrew Tanenbaum in 1992 explaining why
				the i386-based Linux kernel had no future.