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 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…

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