Topic: Telnet Redirection

[Lindsay]

I use an external telnet redirection to redirect telnet connections to an internal box on the network.  

This has worked fine in the past but I have just upgraded the box  from e-smith 4.12 to sme 5.1.2

 The problem is that I get libwrap (hosts.all / hosts.deny) rejecting connection attempts.    

A snippet from the log :

[root@gateway /etc]# May 20 17:45:03 gateway xinetd[5194]: libwrap refused connection to telnet from X.X.X.X

 This only occurs when I have the following lines in the templetes for telnet.   This of course writes the same values out to the telnet section in /etc/xinetd.conf

    bind                         = 203.X.X.X
    redirect                   = 192.168.X.X 23

I have maybe worked out that maybe it has something to do with the hosts.allow / hosts.deny.  This is where i have focused my attention.    When I remove the "ALL:ALL"  setting in hosts.deny it will redirect the telnet with no problems.

As far as I can see everything else is exactly how it should be.  I have compared the new 5.1.2 server to the older 4.1.2 server and I cannot see anything different.   I have also redone my settings,  gone over everything and went reading up about xinetd just in case something has changed that I was not aware of.   I am sort of hitting a brick wall with new things to try.

 Any ideas would be greatly appreciated but there are other issues regarding the need to use telnet .. so please keep the lectures regarding telnet to ones self .. I know the security issues regarding telnet

[Nathan Fowler]

Couldn't you just do telnet:ALL in /etc/hosts.allow or more restrictively, telnet: ?

[Lindsay]

I could do that .. and it works - thank you very much for that.

 Why it works i am not sure,  every thing I read seemed to used "in.telnetd : ALL".  I actually tried a few other variations like "/usr/sbin/in.telnetd" etc and was trying to work out if I could use a port instead of a service .....

  Anyway .. thanks again for taking the time to reply - your a legend  

      Lindsay

[Nathan Fowler]

Anytime man.