Richard Melville wrote:
On 21 August 2015 at 20:41, Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]> wrote:
Richard Melville wrote:
On 21 August 2015 at 19:10, Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Richard Melville wrote:
It was ftp and telnet that I was thinking of, along with rcp,
rexec,
rlogin, rsh and tftp. Surely, ifconfig has been marked as
deprecated
for some time and replaced with iproute2.
I agree that the r* programs are obsolete, but the others are useful
in some circumstances. Many users, including me, expect ifconfig.
Do you know of any distros that do not include ifconfig?
Not sure if that was rhetorical, but no, not off hand. Mind you, I
haven't carried out a survey. It's a fair point, but if it comes down
to having to install inetutils just to get ifconfig I'm not sure that
warrants it. If users have the r* programs the likelihood is that they
will use them, even though we all know that they are a security hazard.
Maybe, at least, there should be a health warning in the book.
Perhaps I'll disable the r* programs, but we still want ftp and telnet.
We could add one of the ftp programs like vsftpd, but that goes against the
intended minimal set of packages in LFS. I do not know where else the
telnet program could be obtained.
Of course, there are plenty of issues with ftp and telnet, but I understand
the problem. Quite often we are forced to use these tools by third
parties: ftp by hosting companies that don't have a decent secure framework
in place, and telnet by wifi router manufacturers, whose cheap and nasty
routers are foisted upon us by cost-cutting ISPs.
BTW, netkit has ftp and telnet as part of the suite.
With respect to ifconfig, that exists as part of the net-tools package
which is already in the BLFS book. Can't that be moved to LFS?
To summarise, iputils (in place of inetutils), netkit, and net-tools
(already in blfs) would be, in my opinion, safer alternatives; no highly
insecure r* programs. We would only be adding one more package and moving
another.
I've made changes in my sandbox to remove the r* tools. It will be in
my next commit.
The telnet program is very useful for testing/debugging, For example,
the telnet program can be used to connect to a http or smtp server to
see the protocol transfer.
I know of no problems with the ftp client we install and it is useful
for a raw lfs system to get additional packages, even though there are
better ways to do that.
The last thing I want to do for LFS is to exchange one package for two
or three others just because the ping program does not handle an
incorrectly formatted /etc/hosts file, even if some other implementation
does handle it. I am open to adding a package to BLFS if it is
reasonable. I did that a long time ago for traceroute.
-- Bruce
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