I am being pushed from AIX onto RHEL 6 and after our first 'chuck it on' install, I have a problem. Where is the old (okay insecure) telnet & ftp server? I know that they are probably regarded as archaic now, but the source servers do not have the SSH tools, so I've got to somehow transfer the data.

Apart from this, I have CRT from VanDyke which is very nice, but the company will not pay the upgrade fee to get the SSH version, so that's going to be a pain.

I do have a closed network, so I'm not too worried about packet snooping.


For a 20+ year support of AIX (with forays into and eventually out of Solaris, SCO Unixware, Dynix, TI-UX) & HP-UX, I'm feeling especially vulnerable as I've never been so stuck. Internet searches send me all over the place without a good target.

I don't even have the client side tools installed.

# time find / -name telnet -o -name ftp        
/var/ftp

real    0m0.40s
user    0m0.19s
sys     0m0.20s
# time find / -name telnetd -o -name ftpd

real    0m0.40s
user    0m0.19s
sys     0m0.21s
#

Install the 'ftp' and 'telnet' packages for the commandline utilities, I think 'telnetd' for telnet server(unsure), and 'proftpd' for a pretty decent FTP server.

Maybe you have xinetd instead of inetd? Being a service wrapper, it's always been kind of optional -- I've personally never understood the use, some distros have it, some don't. On systems which don't, network daemons would just be system services.

True, xinetd is not that much used now a days. But it sure does a good job of make the system resources available for other use. For an example, a PXE server serving TFTP requests. Now, do you really install OSes 24x7? So there's really no use of TFTP server daemon running all the time consuming memory and doing close to nothing. But, if it's controlled by xinetd, the service only started when you get a request. A server which serves occasional ftp requests, can actually use xinetd.

Well, RHEL 6 has vsftpd as the FTP server and telnet-server package for the telnet server. To install these pacakges, you would have to make use of the installation DVD as yum repository. Let me help you with that:

1. Create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/local.repo with the following contents:

[LocalRepo]
name=DVD Repo
baseurl=file:///mnt/dvd
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/sr0 /mnt/dvd

yum install vsftpd telnet-server xinetd -y

Many thanks. Food for thought. We don't actually have original media but I think that the media images were copied onto the base server that we have cloned, so it seems to find them :-

# yum whatprovides vsftpd telnet-server xinetd
Loaded plugins: product-id, rhnplugin, security, subscription-manager
Updating certificate-based repositories.
Unable to read consumer identity
vsftpd-2.2.2-6.el6.x86_64 : Very Secure Ftp Daemon
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



vsftpd-2.2.2-6.el6_2.1.x86_64 : Very Secure Ftp Daemon
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



vsftpd-2.2.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64 : Very Secure Ftp Daemon
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



vsftpd-2.2.2-11.el6.x86_64 : Very Secure Ftp Daemon
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



1:telnet-server-0.17-47.el6_3.1.x86_64 : The server program for the Telnet
                                       : remote login protocol
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



1:telnet-server-0.17-47.el6.x86_64 : The server program for the Telnet remote
                                   : login protocol
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



1:telnet-server-0.17-46.el6.x86_64 : The server program for the Telnet remote
                                   : login protocol
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



2:xinetd-2.3.14-31.el6.x86_64 : A secure replacement for inetd
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



2:xinetd-2.3.14-34.el6.x86_64 : A secure replacement for inetd
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



2:xinetd-2.3.14-29.el6.x86_64 : A secure replacement for inetd
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



2:xinetd-2.3.14-35.el6_3.x86_64 : A secure replacement for inetd
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



2:xinetd-2.3.14-33.el6.x86_64 : A secure replacement for inetd
Repo        : rhel-x86_64-server-6
Matched from:



vsftpd-2.2.2-11.el6.x86_64 : Very Secure Ftp Daemon
Repo        : installed
Matched from:
Other       : Provides-match: vsftpd

Yes, vsftpd works on the same old ftp protocol and supports both active and passive modes. But, it's really tightly secured. That's why the name "Very Secure FTP daemon"