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ssh, gethostbyname, and hosts.deny, oh my!



I've got a little problem here involving ssh, gethostbyname, and
/etc/hosts.deny, which by curious coincidence strongly resembles the
subject line of this post.


The setup:  I'm connecting via ssh to a server on our DMZ, proxied
through a masquerading firewall.  Like this:

             Internet 

       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
           /              \
          /                \
      Masq-FW ----------- Server
         |
         |
         |
    Workstation
   

Sometimes ssh works.  Sometimes it doesn't:

    [karsten@angel:karsten]$ ssh lists
    ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

...maybe 1 of 4 attempts succeeds.

On the host, in /var/auth.log, I see:

    Sep 12 01:10:32 lists sshd[1884]: warning: /etc/hosts.deny, line 15:
    can't verify hostname: gethostbyname(140.208.171.207.in-addr.arpa)
    failed
    Sep 12 01:10:32 lists sshd[1884]: refused connect from 207.171.xxx.xxx

...and looking at /etc/hosts.deny, we find at line 15:

    ALL: PARANOID

(the only non-comment line in the file).

There are no entries in /etc/hosts.allow.


Questions:

    - Can I fix this by allowing SSH access in /etc/hosts.allow.  I'm
      assuming yes and will try this.

    - Why the periodic failure.  If my address cannot be resolved, why
      should it appear to be resolving some of the time, but not always?

    - Doesn this indicate a problem with the masquerading configuration
      (I'm not responsible for this)?  Any further diagnostics to test
      this out?

Thanks.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Opensales, Inc.                    http://www.opensales.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?   Debian GNU/Linux rocks!
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/    K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org
GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0

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