Telnet not starting

[TWBSupport]

Hi all -
Had to bounce one of my test servers (hp9000/hpux 11.1)today and now telnet will not work. It worked fine prior to bouncing the server. inetd is running, however telnetd is not running. I checked to make sure nothing got commented out of inetd.conf and everything is the way it has always been. Any ideas on how to get it back up and working? Is there a way I can force telnetd to start w/o going through inetd? I didn't think so, but thought I would ask.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Check /etc/services (or the services map id you are using NIS) and make sure that the telnet service name can be resolved. Do any of the processes started by inetd work (e.g ftpd)? I would issue an inetd -l command to start inetd logging if it is not doing so already and look for syslog messages are a fresh telnet attempt.

[TWBSupport]

Good call. I should have thought about seeing if inetd is starting anything else. No it is not. When I run inetd, I get the Internet Services Started message, but ftp and telnet are not starting. I'll kick back to the server and check the services.

[Sundar_7]

Denda,

Using netstat, check if indeed something is listening on port 23

# netstat -an | grep "\.23" | grep -i listen

If you dont see anything, it would mean your system is not listening on 23 for the telnet connection

Sundar.

[TWBSupport]

I think I have gremlins...

I run an inetd -l and nothing comes up. So, before I run back to the server to check it out for the services, I try to connect via ip address... IP address connects fine... OK what about hostname now.... hostname connects fine.. UGH.. Could the server actually take about 15 minutes to start up ftp and telnet? Or could have the inetd -l kicked something in?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You now need to check at a lower level. Can you ping other boxes? Can other boxes ping you? If ping works but nothing else then you have an inetd problem.

[TWBSupport]

ping did work when nothing else did, so I agree something with the inetd is gone south. Could I may have a corrupt inetd.conf file? Is that possible? How would I go about replacing it? This is a test machine, so no backups are done on it.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I'm going to say that it is more likely that "inetd -l" actually started inet -- which is the behavior if inetd was not already running. By the time that you are able to log in at the console, inetd has long since started.