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Re: A question about some network services



On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 01:34:32PM -0500, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> > Well, daytime spits out the time of day, time is for NTP,
> > and I'm not sure what discard is used for.
> No, NTP does not use the time port.  It uses port 123 (ntp in
> /etc/services).

Ok, figures I don't know since I don't use it.

> Discard is the network equivalent of /dev/null

Weeee.. an MTU of zero :)

> The question of what to do with these ports comes up every once in a
> while on this list.  Some people prefer to leave them on, others turn
> them off.  I don't think there's ever been an exploit that involves
> these ports, as the code is quite simple (i.e. easy to implement
> securely).

Occasionally, there may be a DOS attack, but nothing invasive.

> > I usually turn off inetd completely. It helps makes things
> > quieter on a nessus scan :)
> Yes, this is good advice, and something that never occurs to most
> people.  Most common services these days run quite happily in standalone
> mode, so there's often no reason to use inetd at all.

Given most everything can run through SSH or SSL (at least TCP-based) :)

-Anne
-- 

              .-"".__."``".   Anne Carasik, System Administrator
 .-.--. _...' (/)   (/)   ``'   gator@cacr.caltech.edu 
(O/ O) \-'      ` -="""=.    ',  Center for Advanced Computing Research    
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