[buug] /etc/service

[Nicolai Rosen]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Zeke Krahlin wrote:
> Another tip from my FreeNetCubs board. Does it sound like a good security
> measure, or too much on the brute-force side? (I know Stoddard recommends
> a similar method for "/etc/indetd.conf".)

This is a good idea with a but. but first you should go in and learn what
you're commenting out. Everything you don't need should go, but you
shouldn't get rid of stuff you haven't a clue about. In terms of services
offered by inetd, I only have auth (for irc). Other than that I consider
everything else more information than I feel like giving out.

> ---begin tip
> 
> What do all those ports mean?
> Posted by Paranoid Chick on 8/2/2000
> 
> Your computer has tons and tons of ports available for connection from
> outside hosts. Like "8080", "21", 3128", etc..... 
> 
> Well, what do all these ports mean? 
> 
> Well the IANA has assigned specific port numbers to particular services on
> your box. If you are running Linux (as you SHOULD be if you are reading
> this) just have a look at the /etc/services file and you'll get an
> eyefull. 
> 
> It's a good idea to comment out (put a '#' in front of) those services you
> know you are not running, like datametrics on port 1645 and radius on port
> 1812. In fact, if you don't know what a particular service is, chances are
> you don't need it and should comment it out! 
> 
> ---end tip

I really can't imagine that this would help anything. If you have no
services running on these ports then it can't do you any harm. There's
nothing on the other end to connect to and they're all standard ports
anyway. It's probably not a good idea to go messing aroudn with this stuff
if you don't know what you're doing and should you implement things later
on it could screw you over.

Nicolai Rosen, nick at netaxs.com
http://www.netaxs.com/~nick/

There are some who argue that this decreases readability. They are wrong.
	-Learning Perl on the use of sort { $a <=> $b } @list Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Christiansen