On Wed, 22 Sep 1999 you wrote:
(I hate programs beeing enabeld by default and I donŽt know what they are doing. There is no Information on SuSE 6.2 about it (e.g. a manpage or anything else) and after upgrading to SuSE6.2 there was this new obscure demon running - I kicked it at once) (And on some machines it caused some trouble so that they werenŽt able to connect to some other machines on the net)
I think all these demons (nscd, httpd,.....) should NOT be enabeld/started by default by /etc/rc.config (SuSE). Especially for a Linux-new-users it is difficult to oversee what all these demons are for and he does not know that they could be security risks.
Anyway, you should always disable EVERY daemon until you know exactly what it does and how to configure. Now, there are two ways to go: a) If you don't install a daemon that you don't know it won't be enabled by default/yast. It's much better to read the man page first -and install a daemon if it is needed. b) If you choose a standard installation with various daemons check your /etc/inetd.conf, disable all unknown daemons (that are enabled by yast) and edit your configuration file (in that you can disable those daemons). One paper to start securing linux ishttp://www.interact.com/~lspitz/linux.html and, if you are more interested in security, the 'Know Your Enemy'-series that you can find in .../~lspitz/pubs.html. Subscribe to bugtraq. Read Howtos and man pages.... -- ----------------------------------------------------- Martin Peikert EN 636 TU Berlin fon 314-23881 Sekretariat EN 2 fax 314-22284 http://www-tet.ee.tu-berlin.de/peikert/index.html -----------------------------------------------------