Product specific information - TurboLinux

 

TurboLinux 3.6 

TurboLinux has an install very similar to Red Hats, you are lead through text based console screens and asked questions, then the system installs the packages and you do some post configuration work (like setting up X). There are a couple of minor issues with TurboLinux you will need to fix, and there are several utilities that ships as standard with TurboLinux that I wish other distributions would include (like sudo).

inetd.conf

TurboLinuxs inetd.conf is relatively sane, however some services like rsh and rlogin are enabled by default, I would advise turning these off.

shell      stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rshd
login   stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rlogind
talk    dgram   udp     wait    nobody.tty      /usr/sbin/tcpd in.talkd
ntalk   dgram   udp     wait    nobody.tty      /usr/sbin/tcpd in.ntalkd

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

inittab

TurboLinux (like most distributions) will let you boot into single user mode, and not prompt you for a password to access the system as root. You either want to put the restricted keyword in lilo.conf and add a password to prevent people from booting the system to single user mode without a password.

ipchains

ipchains is not shipped on the install CD, you will find it on the companion CD, or on the ftp site at: ftp://ftp.turbolinux.com/pub/TurboLinux/tlw-3.6-companion/TurboContrib/RPMS/. I would of course recommend installing ipchains and firewalling your machine.

SSH

SSH rpms are not available for TurboLinux 3.6 (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. 

Tripwire

One thing included on the companion CD with TurboLinux is a copy of Tripwire, I would advise using it. I am not sure what the license on this is (i.e. free for non commercial use only, or one license, or what). It appears to be Tripwire version 1.3, so it is not commercial.

Companion CD

As stated previously the Companion CD contains a lot of extra goodies (like Tripwire), as well as:

Amanda (a nice backup program)
ipmasqadm (used for port forwarding at the kernel level)
ipchains (used for setting up firewalling)
ProFTPD (a better ftp server then WuFTPD)
Squid (ftp and www proxy server)
Tripwire (creates checksum values on files and warns you if they change)

Updates

Updates for TurboLinux 3.6 (Miami) are available from: 
ftp://ftp.turbolinux.com/pub/TurboLinux/turbolinux-updates/3.6/.

 

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