At 06:19 AM 11/15/02 -0500, 1stFlight wrote:
I recently had a friend port scan me as a test of my ip_tables based firewall
And like I wanted he discovered there were no ports open. However if I do a
"netstat -a | grep LISTEN" I see

tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:1024 *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:printer               *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:sunrpc                *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:x11                   *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:ssh                   *:*                     LISTEN


What's going on here? Did I mess up my config? Thanks!
What's "going on here" is that you have applications on the host that are listening on those ports for incoming traffic. Offhand I can't say for sure what, but probably you are running lpd, sshd, the portmapper (say for NFS mounts) and XFree86 (I don't even have a guess for the 1024 entry).

From what your friend found in his portscan, you have firewalling software running somewhere between him and you that blocks his access to these same ports. If the " ip_tables based firewall" is software (more accurately, kernel configuration) running on this same host, -AND- it has only a single network interface, then running the apps that listen on these ports may be pointless (or not; X11 and lpd are surely providing local services as well). Except for the memory they use, running them is harmless. And if you have multiple interfaces (for example, a dial-up PPP connection and a NIC connecting you to a LAN), the firewall *might* be blocking access from the Internet while permitting it from the LAN ... that's one of the things firewalls do, after all.

So ... bottom line ... whether you "messed up" your config depends on undescribed details of your overall setup, and your intent.




--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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