Re: How do I enable Telnet??

Tony Nugent wrote:
> 
> On Mon Mar 10 2003 at 16:30, "System" wrote:
> 
> > edit /etc/xinetd.d/telnet
> > disable   no
> 
> And easier way would be to do this:
> 
>         chkconfig telent on
> 

Agreed. And that's an appropriate answer for a Redhat list.
But, and this is just my personal opinion so please don't
take any of this as critism, I think it's
only part of an answer because it's handing somebody a
fish and not teaching them to fish. 
Chkconfig is a Redhat tool and it's unwise to rely completely
on tools without knowing what it is that they do, doubly
so when they are vender specific tools.

Just look at something as simple as adduser and the questions
about how to move user accounts between machines.
An admin who can install a new user by hand rather than
only by using a helping script will very likely never ask
how to move those users to a new server.

When I ask a question it's generally because I want to learn
something and not because I want somebody to take care of 
something for me, and I assume this to be true in most cases
although it is very definately not always so. If possible,
I try to answer a question in a way that would have satisfied
me if I had been the one who asked it.


In this particular case I would have wanted to know that
the telnet deamon must be running and configured to accept
a connection from my host. I'd want to know that telnet
is inherently insecure and that although it can be started
by hand, generally it is started by the inet process and
is made somewhat more secure with tcp wrappers. Then I'd 
want to be told about the Redhat tool which makes it easier
to interface with the init.d start and stop scripts, 
and THEN I'd want to have ssh suggested to me as a much 
better alternative.

Of course, Blessing might just have wanted the quickest 
button to push to get a remote connection to his linux host
and all of this info would have been just so much bla bla,
but 
a) it's easier to ignore the extra that you don't need
than it is to gain from what isn't there, and 
b) with a complete answer you might answer a question which
hasn't yet been asked and will then not need to be asked
in the future.

Having said all that, I admit to it being a bit more
difficult in a mailing list than in usenet because of the
absence of FAQs and archives and such, and/or the unwillingness
of new list members to use such resources if they exist.

Where am I going with all this?
Nowhere, really. I just got up way too early and am on
my third pot of tea. Got a bit of stimulant to deal with.

Andy

> > Cheers,
> > Tina.
> >   ----- Original Message -----
> >   From: Blessing Kamutande
> >   To: [email protected]
> >   Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 3:41 PM
> >   Subject: How do I enable Telnet??
> >
> >
> >   Hie All,
> >
> >   I have just inherited a network with a Linux box that I want to
> > amdinister remotely from a Windows box and each time I telnet it I get
> > the error message:
> >
> >   Cannot open a connection with 192.168.0.1 from the windoze box.
> >
> >   Please help how do I enable/solve this problem. I am rather new to
> > Linux. I am using RH7.2
> >
> >   TIA
> >
> >   Rgds
> >
> >   Blessing
> 
> Cheers
> Tony