Caldera

 

Caldera OpenLinux 2.2

Caldera has a graphical installation for 2.2 called lizard, with a number of nice features. During the installation it will force you to create a user account, hopefully this will encourage people to not constantly log in as root. As well there is an entry for sulogin in the /etc/inittab file, meaning you cant just type linux single at the lilo boot prompt and get dumped to a command prompt as root, you must first enter roots password. There are however several problems with the default installation that you will need to correct.

inetd.conf

The file /etc/inetd.conf which controls various Internet related services has many older, and dangerous services turned on:

echo       stream  tcp     nowait  root    internal
echo    dgram   udp     wait    root    internal
discard stream  tcp     nowait  root    internal
discard dgram   udp     wait    root    internal
daytime stream  tcp     nowait  root    internal
daytime dgram   udp     wait    root    internal
chargen stream  tcp     nowait  root    internal
chargen dgram   udp     wait    root    internal
gopher  stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd gn
shell   stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rshd
login   stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rlogind
exec    stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rexecd
talk    dgram   udp     wait    nobody.tty      /usr/sbin/tcpd in.talkd
ntalk   dgram   udp     wait    nobody.tty      /usr/sbin/tcpd in.ntalkd
uucp    stream  tcp     nowait  uucp    /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/uucico l

These should all be commented out (place a # at the beginning of the line), and restart inetd with killall 1 inetd.

portmap

One service many people will want turn off is portmap, it is used for a variety of services, such as nfs, and has had a history of problems. Turning it off in OpenLinux is a bit of a pain however since it is started from the same script that initializes inetd. You can either remove the portmap package (rpm e portmap) or you can go into /etc/rc.d/init.d/inet and edit the following:

NAME1=inetd
DAEMON1=/usr/sbin/$NAME1
NAME2=rpc.portmap
DAEMON2=/usr/sbin/$NAME2

to :

NAME1=inetd
DAEMON1=/usr/sbin/$NAME1
#NAME2=rpc.portmap
#DAEMON2=/usr/sbin/$NAME2

and:

# Bail out if neither is present
[ -x $DAEMON1 ] || [ -x $DAEMON2 ] || exit 2

to:

# Bail out if neither is present
[ -x $DAEMON1 ] || exit 2

and:

[ -x $DAEMON1 ] && ssd -S -n $NAME1 -x $DAEMON1 -- $INETD_OPTIONS
[ -x $DAEMON2 ] && ssd -S -n $NAME2 -x $DAEMON2 -- $PORTMAP_OPTIONS

to:

[ -x $DAEMON1 ] && ssd -S -n $NAME1 -x $DAEMON1 -- $INETD_OPTIONS
# [ -x $DAEMON2 ] && ssd -S -n $NAME2 -x $DAEMON2 -- $PORTMAP_OPTIONS

and then comment out this entirely:

NFS=""
cat /etc/mtab | while read dev mpoint type foo; do
[ "$type" = "nfs" ] && NFS="$mpoint $NFS"
done
if [ -n "$NFS" ]; then
echo -n "Unmounting NFS filesystems: "
POLICY=I # Ignore 'device busy' during shutdown
[ "$PROBABLY" != "halting" ] && POLICY=1 # exit on 'busy'
for mpoint in $NFS; do
SVIrun S $POLICY "$mpoint" "!$mpoint" \
umount $mpoint
done
echo "."
fi
amd

Another service installed by default in OpenLinux 2.2 is the Auto Mount Daemon (amd). It allows you to define directories and devices of nfs locations, so I can define /auto/cdrom as being /dev/cdrom, so when you cd /auto/cdrom the system automatically mounts /dev/cdrom as /auto/cdrom with the appropriate options (read-only, etc.). The amd service uses a semi-random port number, usually in the 600-800 range. This service is definitely very useful on a workstation, it saves the users from having to manually mount every removable media device they wish to use (cdrom and floppy being the most common). However I would not recommend on machines running as servers due to a history of problems amd has had. Turning off amd is easy, simply move the symlinks from S30amd to K70amd.

mv /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S30amd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K70amd 
mv /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S30amd /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K70amd 
SSH

SSH rpms are not available for OpenLinux 2.2 (that is to say I have not found any). The SSH rpms for Red Hat systems fail miserably, and the source rpms also fail to compile, SSH does compile cleanly from source code, with no problems. You can get the SSH source code from: ftp://ftp.zedz.net/pub/replay/crypto/SSH/. To start sshd you need to minimally run /usr/local/bin/sshd at boot time from a script, it will look for its config files in /etc, and should start ok. 

Novell 

Havent tested the Novell software yet, unknown if there are any issues.

Updates

Updates for Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 are available from: ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/openlinux/2.2/current/RPMS/.

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