[plug] inetd

[Rob Hall]

On Wed, 05 May 1999, you wrote:

>> That was my thoughts, but if I remove hosts.allow and hosts.deny all works
>> fine. 
>
>Are you sure?  It just doesn't sound like a tcpwrapper problem
>For starters, tcpwrappers have nothing to do with ping, so I'd be very
>surprised if ping started working when you removed hosts.{allow,deny}
>

That was my thoughts exactly.  Yet, I renamed allow & deny and all works
perfectly.  Goes against logic.


 >> I did have a firewall installed, but removed
it to trace what was
 >> causing this.  I have temporarily set the default
policy as masquerade at
 >> boot up.
>
>You mean you're masquerading _everything_? that doesn't sound like a good
>idea at all.
>
>Better would be to run:
>
>ipfwadm -F -a accept -m -W ppp0 -S 10.0.0.0/24
>

That's what (or similar) to what I origionally had.  In fact I had a fairly
tight firewall.  I just set masquerade as default to rule out my firewall.  I
have to leave masquerade on for a few icq users.

>> Ping just sits there until I cancel it.  Telnet says "unable to establish a
>> connection" or something similar.
>
>Again, not symptons of tcpwrappers.  As I said before, ping isn't affected
>by tcpwrappers because it's handled by the kernel, and if you were being
>denied by tcpwrappers you'd find your Telnet would say "Connected to ..."
>followed by a blank line, and then telnet would exit.
>

Exactly.... that is why I'm confused, bewildered ... 

I hear what you are saying Matt.  I am in aggreemant with you.  I can't
understand  how  allow/deny can cause this.  But the fact remains that if I
delete or move them, I suddenly have access.

Here is another weird little symtpom:

If I telnet in when there are now allow/deny files, and install the allow/deny
files and restart inetd, it all works perfectly.  As soon as I reboot the
server, I have problems.  So I dial in (it allows me to do this and establish
telnet this way) and remove the files, reboot the server, and all works fine.

This caught me out yesterday when I set it up on site.  I tested it all and
everything was fine.  But as soon as the server was booted up today, everything
was thrown out the window!  That's when I dialled in and disabled the firewall.
 Still no change.  So I deleted allow/deny, rebooted and everthing worked fine.
 I then reinstalled allow/deny, restarted inetd and it worked.  Somewhat
bewildered, I thought I'd reboot the server just to see what would happen.  It
dialled up ok but I couldn't telnet or ping it.  Weird thing is that I could
telnet to port 25!

At this point I got fed up, dialed in, deleted allow/deny and it is working
again (somewhat insecure).

Maybe diald does something strange?  If anyone has any ideas I'll listen
(pretty desperate at this point).


Rob