I had a problem accessing my Minix VMWare guest OS, via FTP or Telnet. Here is how the problem was solved…
A little bit of history:
Yesterday, I had to set up a RedHat 9 Guest OS for one of my faculty members. I realized that even though telnet was installed and running, I was unable to access it even locally!!! Then I realized that I had to edit the telnet file in /etc/xinetd.d to allow incoming telnet connections (inspite of changes to the firewall configuration to allow incoming telnet connections).
Back to the present: So I realized that perhaps something similar needs to be done even with Minix (after all, it is a variant of Unix and must have similar security features!!!). But, when I went to the /etc folder in Minix, I found no xinetd.d folder. Looking around, I found the serv.access file. Guessing that it must be the right place to look, I opened it. Bingo!
There it was. Only, I had to decipher how the entires should look like in that file. Ever so helpful, a comment asked me to man serv.access. Also, I looked at the/usr/adm/log file. It was all there - all those access denied messages…
Initially, my /etc/serv.access file was like this:
# /etc/serv.access
# 2006-05-21
# See the serv.access(5) man pages to learn how to edit this file
# to make your system safe on the network.
# this is insecure! replace with something more specific asap
telnet ftp: +* log;
# this is better, keep outsiders out
# telnet ftp: +*.local log;
# this records all unsuccessful access attempts in/usr/adm/log
*: -* log;
After a reading the man page and a little tinkering, I changed the line “telnet ftp: +* log;” to “telnet ftp: + log;”. i.e., I just removed the *. May be very insecure, but it does the job for me. Perhaps one could add an IP address or a range of IPs to enhance security (as described in the man page).
One another word, this might be very helpful on the VMWare front: I am still using NAT. I had to just set the IP address of my Minix to be on the same subnet as VMNet8 (which is the default subnet on which VMWare does NAT-ing). Also, the default gateway on the guest OS - Minix - had to be set to VMNet8-subnet-.2` ( The .2 IP is the gateway across which VMWare does NAT).
Thats it!!!. All works fine now…