On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Ted wrote:
> I need to participate in an eGroups chat room that's populated with
> Microflop machines carrying who knows what unclean infestations.
*need* to ? I'm so sorry. ;)
> What is the appropriate software for me to use to contact them, take
> part in their conversations and also protect my machine from abuse?
Unless you need special dedicated software, protecting yourself from the
outside world need not be anything more than how you would normally
protect yourself on the internet.
I.e., avoid the use of telnet, and do not have any outside world facing
FTP servers. Remember the default install of your OS may have included
rpc services, or rsh-server by default that you should remove.
Keep your software up to date.
> I'm not using a firewall at present, just libwrap and xinetd. Advice?
Firewalls are useful, since if one of your services does become
compromised, any port which can be opened from inetd, by a lowlife, wont
respond, if packets are being dropped at the firewall level.
Put simply, if you are worried that your equipment could become
compromised, install and configure one.
> You might as well include advice on how to set up for our own lug irc
> channel too. This is new territory for me. I've only ever used talkd
> and write(1) with people all behind a firewall before.
andy@tigger:~$ irc andyd_
<things on screen>
/join #nottingham
-- Andy Davidson [mob: 07021 117196] [fax:07021 117197] [#nottingham on ircnet]-------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu 22 Nov 2001 - 13:11:09 GMT