20020610: ADDE setup on new machine (cont.)

>From: "Fingerhut, William A" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Lyndon State
>Keywords: 200206052016.g55KGcJ09679 McIDAS-X ADDE

Bill,

>We have not figured this out yet, but I wanted to ask you a related
>question.
>
>Just to fill you in, first, telnet is disabled - but ssh is enabled. I
>can not ssh to either port 500 or 503 either. So, we are trying to determine
>why.  When we figure out why, I'll get back to you.

OK.

>The question (was posed by our sys admin) is that if ports 500 and 503
>were open to everyone, then wouldn't this constitute a security hole? He says
>that someone could login, kill the process and be in the machine. Could
>you comment on this, please?

If you setup /etc/services and /etc/xinetd.d/mcserv and
/etc/xinetd.d/mccompress correctly, you can not login to either of
these ports.  The McIDAS mcserv process gets started and it listens to
the port and relays traffic to appropriate ADDE servers.  Some
confusion might arise from my comment about telnetting to the port.
All that the telnet shows is that something gets started by the
connection attemp and then is listening.  On your machine, nothing is
getting started, or, at least, the correct thing is not being started.
In order to further control access through ports 500 and 503, have
your system administrator add the following line to /etc/hosts.allow:

mcservsh:       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Replace the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with as much of the local subnet as desired.
Here are examples:

mcservsh:       155.42.21.12        <- limits ADDE traffic to foxfire alone
mcservsh:       155.42.21           <- limits ADDE traffic to 155.42.21 subnet
mcservsh:       155.42              <- limits ADDE traffic to 155.42 subnet


One thought, there may be another process loaded on your machine that
is called 'mcserv'.  Have your system administrator login to foxfire
as 'root' and see if there is such an application -- that is not part
of McIDAS -- and remove it/rename it if one is found.

The other things that usually trip people up are:

o incorrect entries in /etc/xinetd.d/mcserv and /etc/xinetd.d/mccompress:
  The entries should look something like:

service mcserv
{
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        port                    = 500
        user                    = mcadde
        server                  = /home/mcidas/bin/mcservsh
        server_args             = -H /home/mcidas 
        disable                 = no
        log_type                = FILE /dev/null
}

service mccompress
{
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        port                    = 503
        user                    = mcadde
        server                  = /home/mcidas/bin/mcservsh
        server_args             = -H /home/mcidas 
        disable                 = no
        log_type                = FILE /dev/null
}

  The things that might have to be changed are the fully qualified
  pathname for mcservsh (if, for instance the HOME directory of
  'mcidas' is not /home/mcidas) or the specification of where the
  HOME directory is (the server_args setting).

  Note that the log_type will not be /dev/null if you want server
  transactions logged in system log files.

o the entries in /etc/services for ports 500 and 503 are not setup
  correctly.  NOTE: on RedHat Linux v7.x, /etc/services entries do
  not have to be changed for McIDAS use as long as the entries in
  /etc/xinetd.d/mcserv|mccompress are setup correctly.

o the appropriate signal was not sent to xinetd after the mods were made

o the .mcenv setup in ~mcidas is not correct

I can login in and poke around if this starts to drag out.

Tom