I try and get a connection to my server but I can't, so I change host.allow to but that doesn't work. Then I take everything out of host.deny and that doesn't work because keeps magically reappearing. So I delete host.deny and it just comes crawling back from the dead. What should I put in these files?

What do you mean "trying to connect" to your server? Many standalone servers don't reference hosts.allow and hosts.deny for their connections. Is the service in question being run through TCP wrappers?

As far as the file being recreated... what OS/distribution are you running? Have you tried creating a read-only/immutable version of the file?

The thing that sticks out most is that your hosts.allow should be higher-priority than what's in your hosts.deny file. I'm not sure why you'd be having problems unless there's a configuration problem elsewhere. Perhaps you have a packet filter (firewall) of some sort with a broken ruleset?

I set up ftp service and I'm trying to access it from a different computer.

I am running Mandrake 10 without a firewall.

The 'different computer' wouldn't happen to be an off-campus computer, would it? UMR IT blocks inbound FTP connections to most of the campus network.

Have you tried connecting to it from itself? Give it a try with a command line FTP client. They're much more verbose when problems develop, and should help you pinpoint the problem fairly quickly.

Exacly what kind of problems are you seeing? Is the connection being refused, timing out, or immediately disconnecting? They all have different implications as to what's wrong.

I don't think the problem is in hosts.allow and hosts.deny. Your inetd service should be allowing proper passthrough if hosts.allow has "ALL: ALL" in it.

Both computers are on campus.

I'll try connecting from itself.

The connection is being refused. It finds the host and during authorization I get cut off with "The connection has been refused"

Update: I can connect to it just fine after changing the host files. I basically took everything out. Things worked fine last night one night, so I didn't touch it and went to sleep. The next day it didn't work. It didn't even get touched during the whole time but somehow managed to change the host files back to their unwanted previous forms. Everytime I reboot it also changes the host files back. How do I prevent linux from changing the host files?

Provided the automation bulldada Mandriva likes to add to their distro doesn't detect it, you can probably get by with making those files read-only.

As far as I know, Linux has broken immutable file support with the default security mode and standard file systems. You probably aren't going to switch to OpenBSD, so I'll set that idea aside.

If the read-only file trick doesn't work, you could be even more kludgey and link the files to /dev/null. Both hard links and symlinks should work, but you've obviously gotta use symlinks across file systems.


I'm still rather mystified as to why this problem revolves around those files. What FTP server and version are you running?