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Re: RH Taroon Beta Open Ports



rhldevel assursys co uk wrote:

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Chris Ricker wrote:



On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 rhldevel assursys co uk wrote:



There's always a trade-off between security and ease-of-use. What proportion
of the installed base of Linux clients use RPC-based protocols? Not many I'd
wager, suggesting that the trade-off can be biased towards security, with
little-to-no impact on the majority of users.


Most Linux client systems, in my experience, are NFS clients and therefore need portmap, statd, and lockd out-of-the-box.



For libraries, labs, schools and universities, that wouldn't surprise me. Such organisations generally have good-to-excellent security awareness.

But for small-to-medium businesses (who have the least security awareness
and infrastructure) and home users (similarly), I'd categorically disagree.
If any file/print sharing is happening in these environments, it's usually
SMB based. Samba doesn't get enabled by default, so why the exception for
portmap and rpc.statd?



later,
chris



Best Regards, Alex.


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Apache is quite possibly used in by more users than NFS and it is not enabled by default either. I think that if portmap is really that necessary, and I don't think it is, having it configured to only listen on loopback - akin to the stock sendmail configuration - would be a good step. If the admin wants to enable NFS, they tweak the config or a sysconfig entry and voila, they are on the network. Asking an admin that wants to use NFS to do a couple of chkconfig statements is not much, especially when it reduces the network footprint of the stock install.




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