Hard ftp'ing...

[alexpgp]

When Mandrake installed itself on 'bagger', I chose a "medium security" setup, more from an understanding that "low security" was little better than leaving my keyboard open to the world, and that "high security" probably wouldn't accept any input from any source at all, let alone the root user equipped with the correct password and biometric authentication.

So I hadn't really sweated not being able to ftp into 'bagger' from my desktop Windows box... until I ran across a file that was bigger than what you can stuff onto a floppy disk. After a few minutes poking around the old familiar territory of inetd.conf, it occurred to me that there was no in.ftpd daemon installed on the machine. Without that daemon, ftp'ing into the box would be a challenge for even the most experienced hacker, since there is no ftp server to run to allow access.

The MandrakeSoft web site is useless, unless you want to view marketing slime about version 8.0 of the product. So, I went looking for a suitable ftp server, and I think I found one (at least it works) in proftpd. I couldn't get it to work via inetd, but that's no big deal... I just run it in standalone mode.

And all the files I need to be somewhere are now where they belong.

Cheers...

Comments

[jdcatron.livejournal.com]

It's been said before, but the most secure computer is the one encased in cement and dropped in the mid-atlantic trench.

The problem is that it's not very *useful*. The trick is useful security. That's hard.

That said, you'll probably want to keep an eye on bugtraq for proftpd security holes. ftp, as a service, is a big PITA security-wise. I've yet to meet an ftp daemon that I'd trust in production, but proftpd isn't too bad. scp is a better alternative, if you can get a working scp client on the windows box (not a trivial task, in my experience)

JD

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my former boss knew all about computer security on an intuitive level. It was always fun to listen to a conversation between her and a salesman trying to convince her to let him network the accounting department in with the rest of the company (albeit the conversations did have a tendency to be short :^).

The answer tended to be not only no, but hell no!

The urge to post came after realizing that I could not run ftp on the box if I wanted to, and then not having any reasonable way - by way of the folks who sell the OS - of implementing a solution. Ah, well.

Cheers...