Telnet - serious issue

[brian_31]

I have tried the standard troubleshooting. this is what i see as error

. No listener...
% Connection refused by remote host
when i telenet to this machine. what could be the issue?

Thanks

Brian

[Court Campbell]

Can you logon to the host you are trying to reach via console? Then you could check whether telnet is even configured on the host.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Exactly as it says. There is no telnetd daemon being spawned on the remote end. Examine /etc/inetd.conf on the remote host. There should be a "telnet" entry and I'll bet that yours is commented out. You will need to uncomment that line and issue an "inetd -c" command to trigger a reread of inetd.conf. (NOTE: The above instructions assume that the remote box is an HP-UX box; if not, the instructions are silmialr but vary a bit depending upon the OS version.)

[rick jones]

In addition to there being a telnet entry in the inetd.conf file, there needs to be a telnet entry in the /etc/services file and/or whatever /etc/nsswitch.conf says will be used for services. Further, there should be a TCP endpoint in the listen state in the output of netstat -an | grep LISTEN (telnet is port 23, the 'n' in -an will disable converting the number to a name)

If all those things are true, there could be a firewall either on the system itself (ipfilter) or between the clients and this server which is rejecting connection requests to the telnet port.

[Tim Hempstead]

Note that if telnet is commented in inetd.conf then I would not just uncommment it and inetd -c without checking that it isn't commented for a specific reason, (e.g. security audit requirements).

It may be that telnet has been purposely disabled to force SSH usage.

Tim

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Brian,

Miracle today: Meaningful Unix error message.

Check inetd.conf
Make sure telnetd is not commented and can run.

inetd -c

Alternate suggestion: Start using secure shell. http://software.hp.com Search for secure shell.

SEP