OEL 5.6: Enable Telnet and FTP

Since I "broke" my last installation and couldn't easily get the latest and greatest Oracle Enterprise Linux running correctly (1, forgot the Desktop components, 2, I can't remember), I went back to OEL 5.6 (Carthage).

I have about 100 files that I need to move over to that server and with my issues with VirtualBox Shared folders in the past, I figured I would just FTP them. Well, FTP isn't on by default...and since this is a sandbox, I don't much care about "real" authorization.

FTP
For FTP, go into /etc/xinited.d/ and open up gssftp

[root@medicaid xinetd.d]# vi gssftp 

# default: off
# description: The kerberized FTP server accepts FTP connections \
#              that can be authenticated with Kerberos 5.
service ftp
{
        flags           = REUSE
        socket_type     = stream
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        server          = /usr/kerberos/sbin/ftpd
        server_args     = -l -a
        log_on_failure  += USERID
        disable         = yes
}

By default, it is disabled.

To enable it, change disable = yes to disable = no. That's not it though. If you try to ftp in, you'll see this:

oraclenerd@oraclenerd:/usr/bin$ ftp medicaid
Connected to medicaid.
220 medicaid FTP server (Version 5.60) ready.
Name (medicaid:oraclenerd): oracle
530 Must perform authentication before identifying USER.
Login failed.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.

With the help of this discussion, I removed the server arguments. From what I can tell, those are there for Kerberos authentication, which I don't need or care about. Your final file should look like this:

service ftp
{
        flags           = REUSE
        socket_type     = stream
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        server          = /usr/kerberos/sbin/ftpd
        server_args     =
        log_on_failure  += USERID
        disable         = no
}

Then you can do this:

oraclenerd@oraclenerd:/usr/bin$ ftp medicaid
Connected to medicaid.
220 medicaid FTP server (Version 5.60) ready.
Name (medicaid:oraclenerd): oracle
331 Password required for oracle.
Password:
230 User oracle logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.

Telnet
The process is nearly identical for telnet, here's the config file:

service ftp
{
        flags           = REUSE
        socket_type     = stream
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        server          = /usr/kerberos/sbin/ftpd
        server_args     =
        log_on_failure  += USERID
        disable         = yes
}

For telnet, just change disabled=yes to disabled=no.

oraclenerd@oraclenerd:/usr/bin$ telnet medicaid
Trying 192.168.1.6...
Connected to medicaid.
Escape character is '^]'.

    medicaid (Linux release 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Mon Mar 29 22:10:29 EDT 2010) (2)

login: oracle
Password: 
Last login: Mon Feb 28 14:38:06 on :0
[oracle@medicaid ~]$

Next time, I won't have to remember, or I'll have blown away so many instances that I'll just remember, either way, this is my record.

Update
So, twitter gave me the following after I posted the link to this post:



My answer, How in the f would I know something like this? I have no fancy training. :)

So, now I'm using ssh and sftp. Much easier, and it just seems to work. No configuration necessary. Yeah for Mr. Norris.