opening a port

[Sixtease]

Hello all.

I need to install an application (manatee corpus manager in case you know it) to a server. The app accepts at port 5016. I had the port opened in firewall (the admin did it). xinetd was configured. I get "connection refused" though.

I tried nmap to see if the port was open. nmap did not mention 5016. I removed the manatee xinetd entry and opened an ssh tunel on that port

ssh -gL 5016:localhost:22 localhost

Now I can do

ssh -p 5016 quest.ms.mff.cuni.cz

I am prompted for password and I log in OK. Why does nmap never mention port 5016 even though it obviously is open and ssh listens on it?

[Sixtease]

OK, I solved it. I still don't know why nmap ignores ports where ssh tunnels are made but it just seems to be the case. My problem was in something completely different than a closed port - /etc/services contained some characters that looked like spaces but were really not (probably some unicode garbage), so xinetd didn't parse the appropriate line. The key hint was trying to connect and then inspecting /var/log/messages