Re: System security question
To quote Martin Bishop <martinbishop@crosswinds.net>,
# Netstat shows the following services on my home machine:
<snip>
# Is it safe to leave it as it is? I've closed of all services in
# inetd.conf and I'm using Firestarter as my firewall. I'm a little
# paranoid that my system is listening for connections. But I don't
# know enough to tell if these are internal services or if these
# services are listening to outside connections.
#
# What do you guys advise?
Well, Linux is a very network-oriented operating system, so you'll
always have things listening for connections. Those particular ones look
fairly normal.
HOWEVER, you should do a couple of things:
1) Read up on hosts.allow and hosts.deny , and then edit them in /etc .
Make sure you make them secure.
2) Use a real firewall(not that Firestarter isn't nice, I use it myself
to display firewall logs), such as "rc.firewall"(recently renamed to
"rcf"), which you can find on Freshmeat. Read all the instructions very
carefully, and set it up.
If you have a nearly-inpenetrable firewall, you don't really need to
worry so much about what's listening for connections on your machine. Of
course, always worry, but you won't need to fret over it so much.
Dave
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