[plug] telnet access in Red Hat 6.1

[Dennis Plester]

List,

I recently put together an old box of bits and pieces, P2-266 32 MB RAM, 520
MB HDD, and installed the server default install of Red Hat 6.1 on it. After
much reading and fiddling, I managed to set it up as an Internet gateway and
very basic firewall for my LAN at home, which is comprised of one Win 98
machine and another MDK 7.2/Win 98 dual boot PC. The Net account is a plain
old iiNet dial up with dynamic IP via external 33.6K modem, and I use wvdial
to bring up the connection.

I had all this working for about a week, with the two client PCs turning the
connection on and off via telnet. (I know I should be using ssh, but I'm
taking this one step at a time.) I would use "telnet 192.168.1.1" from
either windows or Linux, and it would offer me login to the Red Hat box
straight away.

I went to connect last night, and I couldn't get either client to telnet
into the gateway box. It refuses to allow them in, from either Win 98 or
Mandrake 7.2 on either PC, stating the connection was refused by the host. I
can still ping the gateway from both, and vice versa. The network interface
itself is definitely still up.

If I log in on the gateway box directly, and bring the connection up again,
everything continues along its merry way with the Net connection shared over
both clients, including the appropriate packets for UT and Q3A :=), but I
can not telnet into the gateway box from the other PCs for love or money.

What provides the telnet service? Is it a daemon? If so, what is it called?
Where would I found out whether this service is being disabled, or if it is
broken? I haven't got my log files here to post, but perhaps someone could
suggest where I start looking, so I can learn by trying to fix it? I did
briefly look at dmesg and some other logs last night, but the only error is
a warning that ssh hasn't started correctly because of a missing key, but
it's been doing that since the beginning, even when it worked. Man telnet
only tells me about how to telnet into something else, not the service
itself.

If someone can help, I'd be very grateful, as the gateway PC does not
normally have a screen or a keyboard plugged in. It just hides around the
back of a desk. I don't want to have to continually plug in a keyboard and
monitor just to log in and start a connection. This all used to work very
well, and suddenly it has stopped.

Thanks in advance,

Dennis.