[techtalk] Security techniques ( Redhat 6.2 question)

[Alex Yan]

Hi Beverly,

I think that the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files are both used by
tcpd, and if she's not running inetd, then she's probably not running
anything with the tcpd wrapper, in which case, whatever remaining
services she has won't use those files for keeping out intruders.

This is the way I think it works:

 inetd: looks up all the services in inetd.conf and connects them to
	their respective ports

 tcpd:  a wrapper for running those services, which reads hosts.allow
	and hosts.deny to determine whether a client has permissions
	to connect to that service.  tcpd is usually invoked in
	inetd.conf:

	telnet  stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd

 in.telnetd: one of the services that is run, wrapped by tcpd, managed
	by inetd.

So theoretically, one could run those services with the tcpd wrapper
directly, which would still give you that nice security layer.  But I
don't know how to do that.  :)

I hope I didn't confuse anyone.


-- 

-Alex Yan
 flare at serv.net