RH6.2 Custon Install: ftp and telnet services are not working. 1

[SYEDWASIMALI]

Hi everyone,

It has been a day and half that I am struggling with this problem and finally, I think I will present this question here.

The test subject is the PIII box (10.20.30.40) with RH6.2 Custom installation all by itself. 'netstat -a | grep "ftp"' shows that the ftp service is running. Next, if I locally try to 'ftp localhost' or 'ftp 10.20.30.40', it works. However, a ftp attempt from a different computer on the same subnet, physically sitting right next to it, fails as follows:

C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC>ftp 10.20.30.40
-> ftp: connect:Connection refused
ftp> bye

Let me also say that a ping attempt from the other computer works just fine.

I get the same failures for 'rlogin' or 'telnet' attempts. Conclusion: All IP services seem to be up and active on '10.20.30.40' itself, but they are inaccessible from outside. Further, if I try to ftp or telnet 'out' of '10.20.30.40', it works fine.

It seems like a firewall-like entity on '10.20.30.40' itself is preventing other computers from accessing tcp applications. What I don't know is how to find out what/where is it? Let me also note that I did not explicitly select any packages from the standard RH6.2 distribution install that advertise FW properties. I checked /etc/hosts.allow and added the only line "ALL: ALL". Also, I made sure that /etc/hosts.deny file has all the lines commented out. '10.20.30.40' can access the DNS server on the network and do name resolutions, so this doesn't look like TCP/IP configuration problem.

Has anyone experienced this problem before? Most recently, I installed RH7.0 and that installation went smoothly without a glitch. Any help or suggestion in this regard will be highly appreciated.

Does RH6.2 install a firewall by default? Is there a way for me to check if the firewall option is turned on?

thanks in advance.

-Syed.

 

[patel]

Did you uncomment the line in inetd.conf file
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.ftpd -l -a

if not do it. and restart the inetd.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/identd restart

Sachin

 

[SYEDWASIMALI]

Sachin,

Thanks for the reply. 'inetd' is started and the telnet/ftp server process is started. I verified this by (1) 'ps -ef' and (2) locally doing a ftp and telnet.

-Syed.

 

[GoldenEternity]

What do your logs say? Does it mention the connection?

 

[SYEDWASIMALI]

Problem Solved.

After three days of misery, while this troubled linux box was rebooting, I pinged the assigned IP address and to my surprise, the ping was successful. It turned out that the IT folks gave me a conflicting static IP address that was earlier assigned to a different machine. uuuurrrrrggghhhh...