[nos-bbs] Bad Pi2 --> Good piece of Pi - Secrets revealed

[jerome schatten]

Thanks to all who took the time to offer their suggestions about my telnet problem on the Pi2!

The penultimate try showed that the Pi1(the original pi)  uses the command: 'sudo /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart’ to restart all the network daemons including the telnet server ’telnetd', But here on the Pi2, there is NO ‘openbsd-inetd’ file in the /etc/init.d directory.   So I see they have gotten rid of inetd and replaced it with xinetd and more xstuff and moved a bunch of other stuff around in the Pi2.

Trying the command ‘sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart’ returns a message that the superserver has stopped and has started again. Hooray!, I was able to restart all the network daemons in the Pi2, or so I thought.

But 'netstat -a'  showed that no telnet service was available, much less running.  

Enter N1URO, who very swiftly had battled the ‘superserver’ to the ground and added the following:  In /etc/xinetd.d/  he remotely added a file called ‘telnet’ with the following content:

service telnet
{
        disable         = no
        socket_type     = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        user            = root
	server		= /usr/sbin/in.telnetd
        wait            = no
	instances	= 20
}
 
And Bingo… telnet worked.

Of course I had to swear a heavy oath to never use telnet on my pi2;  and of course I had my fingers crossed when I told him — no problem.  So what is one to think about an install of a service that has no possibility of working unless you knew the secret handshake?  My conclusion is that they, the pi-guys, made it that way on porpoise!  How better to keep folks from using telnet than making it virtually impossible  use out of the box?  Me I learned a lot of stuff by going as far as I could, and that was, for me, the idea of this exercise. Thanks again folks!

jerome