Guys,

We have taken a copy of our live filesystem to use for testing, but they want to be sure that no contact can be made to any of the live servers etc, I told them the best way would be to have this handled at the firewall level etc, but it seems that not possible, so.... would it be possible/feasible to search the whole file system for certain strings, for example ftp, I know the following command:

Could be used, but the issue is more that it brings back every occurence of the string, as you would expect, but say I search for ftp, it will bring back xxxxxftp, is there another way of checking for stuff like this, or checking the permissions on files, or taking some other approach to doing this?

Thanks

the best way IMO is to test your system in an isolated lan.

This is what i mentioned above Ghost, but thats not possible i'm afraid

no, i did not see you mention it. What i meant is, an isolated LAN, not connected by your firewall, that you can do testing in. However since you don't have it, then you could try the find command you have posted. pls make clear, what do you mean by "it will bring back xxxxftp" ?? do you mean you only want to search for "ftp" and not things like xxxxftp, ftpyyyyyy, or zzzftpxxx ?

Kind of, yes i know that you could add the -w option for the full word, but that mite not bring back some results we want to.

Would it be possible to use the hosts file to reroute certain ip address back on themselves or something like that?

then a different approach can be made. how about turning on any software firewalls, like iptables/ipchains or something? you can set it to block connections out from your server.

Are these installed on the actually servers themselves?