[Eug-lug] Sun RPC vs Debian

[Steve]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 17:00 -0800, Allen Brown wrote:
> I need to be able to use the commands that I think are called
> Sun RPC.  I am referring to the commands rlogin, rcp, etc.
> 
> I know these commands are insecure.  I am inside a corporate
> firewall trying to talk with computers that are running HPUX.
> And the admins of those systems are sometimes reluctant to
> install ssh.  But I need to be able to rsync to these
> computers via a cron job.
> 
> RedHat installed these commands.  They worked just fine.
> 
> Debian does not install them.  Instead it installs ssh
> right over those program names.  And ssh wants to use
> port 22.  Wrong port for this protocol.
> 
> I did a apt-cache search for rpc and rcp.  If the rpc
> commands are there, I sure don't recognize them.  What
> should I find?  How can I solve this problem?

These services, rlogin, rsh and the likes, are maintained in inetd (or
xinetd depending on distribution). You can look for them
in /etc/inetd.conf or in /etc/xinetd.d/*. If I remember right, and
that's not likely - I've slept since I last used Debian, Woody ships
inetd. You might need to start the inetd server after you comment out
what you don't need from the inetd.conf file. inetd is commonly shut off
since there are a lot of services that it serves up that are insecure.

Sun RPC on the other hand is a service that exposes the RPC protocol.
It's probably already running, look at netstat -nl for any portmapper
listener (port 111), since services like NFS require RPC to function.

-- 
Steve <euglinux at nwtechops.com>