Cannot ftp or telnet to linux : help required

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 12:41 +0100, John Dunn wrote:
> I cannot ftp or telnet to my redhat 9 linux box.
> 
> It can ftp or telnet to itself, but I cannot do so from any other machine.
> 
> This is just a test machine so please do not tell me to use ssh. I just want
> to be able to telnet and ftp.
> 
> 
> 1. I have the firewall configuration set to no firewall
> 
> 2. I have tried stopping iptables but that did not help
> 
> 3. hosts.allow and hosts.deny are empty.
> 4. xinetrd.d/telnet has disable = no

Did you "service xinetd restart" after editing that file?  Did you
verify that the telnet binary actually exists?  If you had an abnormal
shutdown, perhaps that file was corrupted.

> 5. hosts file contains only an entry of 127.0.0.1 for the localhost and an
> entry for the machine ipaddress and hostname
> 
> 6. When I try to ftp I get the following message in /var/log/messages :
> 
> vsftpd : warning : can't get client address : Bad file descriptor :

vsftpd tries to do a reverse DNS lookup on the client's IP.  That
message seems related to that operation.  As an experiment, try putting
the client's data in your /etc/hosts file and see if the message goes
away.

> 7. There are also messages as follows :
> modprobe: cannot locate module binfmt-0500
> but I am not sure whether they are connected to the telnet or ftp.

Hmmm.  Did you check /etc/modules.conf?  IIRC, that's a module from
ye ol' wu-ftpd (the standard ftp daemon on RH9).

> Any ideas what is wrong?
> 
> This was working at one point!

Did you have a crash or abnormal shutdown at some point?  Much of this
looks like some of the binaries or configs got gronked.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate -
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