Enabling telnet in RHEL4

[thatishari]

Hi all,

I wana know how to enable the telnet in a linux server and whether is there any packages is to be installed for that?.
Please give me a good solution or a exact link for this.

Thanks in advance,
Hari.

[Rubberman]

You need the inetd/xinetd services started, and configured to run telnet. Go to /etc/xinetd.d and edit the file 'telnet'. You need to set 'disable = no' instead of 'disable = yes'. Then restart the network services with the command: service xinetd restart

[debojitkakoti]

just write "telnet" in terminal........
u need not install anything...

[Rubberman]

just write "telnet" in terminal........
u need not install anything...

Not true since they want to install the telnet server. Yes, they can run the telnet client without installing anything, or configuring anything, but it won't allow remote telnet clients on the LAN to connect with the system unless the telnet server is enabled. That's what I was showing - how to set up the xinetd connection handler to allow telnet connections from remote clients.

[thatishari]

Hi,

even after i am doing wt u have told i can't enable the telnet services just by simply typing telnet in terminal i can connect to an another server but this is not the thing i want actually. Now i am using PUTTY tool to connect my server i want to connect it from my command(my PC) propmt itself please help me in this.

after i have set the no in the telnet file i tried to connect the server i got an error as follows
getnameinfo: localhost: Success
Temporary failure in name resolution: Illegal see
k


Connection to host lost.

[Rubberman]

Let me see if I understand this correctly. You are trying to connect to localhost? IE, you are trying to make a connection from your computer back to your computer? Well, it works for me! Of course, I just used the normal telnet client instead of putty. I did this

telnet localhost

and it connected, asked for my userid and password, and then logged me in just fine. I then connected via putty from my XP laptop and it worked also. Of course, my server is CentOS/RHEL 5 and not 4. I don't know if that is part of the problem or not (the OS version).

[thatishari]

No you understood wrongly i am not asking connecting to the localhost, i am asking about connecting a other server from our desktop. For linux OS the telnet services are not enabled by default after installing the OS we want to enable it manually but for solaris platforms even after installing the OS the telnet services are enabled itself by default...

[Rubberman]

No you understood wrongly i am not asking connecting to the localhost, i am asking about connecting a other server from our desktop. For linux OS the telnet services are not enabled by default after installing the OS we want to enable it manually but for solaris platforms even after installing the OS the telnet services are enabled itself by default...

Well, as you know, Solaris is NOT Linux. You need to enable telnet deliberately on Linux since it is a security concern. There are a number of reasons why you cannot connect to the server.

1. The server's IP address may have changed, but your client system DNS cache is out-of-date.
2. You might be trying to login as root, but the server hasn't been configured to allow remote root access.

etc. In any case, your error:

Temporary failure in name resolution: Illegal seek

which I presume came from Putty, is likely a problem on the client side. Have you tried rebooting the client system? Also, is the client a Windows or a Linux box?

[DaveM]

I highly recommend you avoid telnet and use ssh. Much more secure in that the traffic is encrypted and a nefarious person on your network can't sniff your plaintext id/password pairs.

It is enabled by default in most versions of Linux, and the iptables rules are already there to support inbound connections.

DaveM

[thatishari]

hi Rubberman,

yes u are correct i tried login the server as root only but i have enabled the ftp login in the /etc/vsftpd/ftpusers file and the uesr_list by removing the root from both these files...

Thanks for ur suggestion DaveM but i just want to know the steps involved in enabling the telnet...