Running telnet

Platform OpenBSD 3.2 stable

How do I set up and configure telenet access to my machine?

both plain telnet and ssh? any good guides out there?

telnet runs usually from your /etc/inetd.conf.

Inetd is the internet superserver, it's a daemon which runs and listens on all the ports you configure it to, and when someone connects, it runs the appropriate server program and connects the socket to it. There should be a line in /etc/inetd.conf that mentions telnet that comes commented out in openBSD, you should be able to uncomment that line then send a HUP signal to inetd, and telnet should open up.


# vi /etc/inetd.conf

...

# ps xa | grep inetd
115 ?? Is 0:00.46 /usr/sbin/inetd -wW
# kill -HUP 115
#


The Secure Shell daemon, on the other hand, needs to be running constantly so it can regenerate those nifty little crypto keys that make it so secure. To enable sshd, you need to have a line like the following in your /etc/rc.conf:

sshd="YES"

And you'll need to reboot for /etc/rc.conf to be noticed. The
first time you reboot after making this change, your machine might take a while to generate its keys; this will only happen once. On my 40MHz sparcstation, it took half an hour I think. Probably on modern-day i386 hardware it won't take quite that long.

The line to put in /etc/rc.conf may be different in OpenBSD. Read rc.conf(5) [man -5 rc.conf]. I use FreeBSD and NetBSD, which are very similar to Open. Used to use Open once, but one day a remote root vulnerability was found in the ftp daemon. Guess which BSD flavor fixed it last? OpenBSD. Their excuse: The ftp daemon is not enabled by default, therefore OpenBSD is secure. Funny, NOTHING is enabled by default.

Ah, but it's been since 2.8 since I tried it, so ........