Re: Remote access to a noffle news server

On 03-May-2004 Richard Worwood wrote:
> I'm a newbie to noffle and to be honest configuring news servers in general
> and I'm having a bit of a problem setting up noffle so that I can access it
> remotely using a non linux news client such as outlook express.
> 
> I've got ipchains setup to permit access to port 119 and also xinetd
> configured to start noffle but it is not allowing connections to port 119
> remotely.

Yes, the inital setting up can be a bit fiddly.

The first thing to do is to get everything working for local access on the
server machine. On the server, try

$ telnet localhost nntp

If everything is working on the server, you'll see

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 NNTP server NOFFLE 1.1.4

If, on the other hand, it says

Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

then the xinetd setup isn't right. I'm still on inetd, but I believe that the
noffle xinetd configuration should look like this:

service nntp
{
        disable         = no
        socket_type     = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        wait            = no
        user            = news
        group           = news
        only_from       = 127.0.0.1
        server          = /usr/bin/noffle
        server_args     = -r
}

Note the setting for 'disable'. Also, if you want to allow access from other
machines you'll need to do something about only_from.

Once you can connect on the server, then remote access problems are either
xinetd from restrictions or iptables problems.

Hope this helps. Let us see your xinetd configuration if you still have
problems.

Finally, if you're planning to allow access over the net, you'll want some form
of authentication....


-- 
Jim Hague - [email protected]          Never trust a computer you can't lift.


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