[svlug] Local computer responds "connection refused"

[Seth David Schoen]

Karl F. Larsen writes:

> This sounds like a problem with the firewall configuration. When I loaded 
> Red Hat 7.2 it was necessary to decide what level of firewall to mount. 
> For fun I made mine complete, so even a root user can't telnet or ftp to 
> my linux.
> 
> Now on my linux hackers try to get on and try passwords but it fails to 
> work. Likewise a LAN computer trying to telnet or ftp would fail.

That's reasonable -- lots of people consider telnet and ftp obsolete now.

If you don't have a specific need for them, it's _appropriate_ to
disable telnet and ftp on computers these days, and use some mixture
of ssh, sftp, http, and rsync instead.

Instead of telnet and rsh/rlogin: ssh
Instead of anonymous FTP: http, or anonymous rsync (they're faster, too!).
Instead of FTP for one file: scp
Instead of FTP for many files: rsync -e ssh

The only problems here are

(1) supporting legacy machines with no secure login/file transfer
clients (especially Windows machines)

(1a) supporting legacy software which insists on using ftp for file
transfers

(2) losing the interactive directory browsing that you get with ftp

You can possibly solve (2) with sftp.  (1) and (1a) are tricky, as I
learned when helping my mom with some Windows web page authoring
software.  There's no reason that the software _has_ to use FTP, but a
typical Windows machine and much typical Windows software will not
support anything else.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Reading is a right, not a feature!
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   |                 -- Kathryn Myronuk
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |