Enabling Telnet and FTP services in RHEL and Solaris

This was the problem I use to face whenever a new build machine had to be configured.

Following steps were taken to configure FTp on Linux and Solaris boxes.

Linux is configured to run the Telnet and FTP server, but by default, these services are not enabled. To enable the telnet service, login to the server as the root user account and run the following commands:

# chkconfig telnet on
# service xinetd reload
Reloading configuration: [  OK  ]

Starting with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 release (and in CentOS Enterprise Linux), the FTP server (wu-ftpd) is no longer available with xinetd. It has been replaced with vsftp and can be started from /etc/init.d/vsftpd as in the following:

# /etc/init.d/vsftpd start
Starting vsftpd for vsftpd:         [ OK ]

If you want the vsftpd service to start and stop when recycling (rebooting) the machine, you can create the following symbolic links:

# ln -s /etc/init.d/vsftpd /etc/rc3.d/S56vsftpd
# ln -s /etc/init.d/vsftpd /etc/rc4.d/S56vsftpd
# ln -s /etc/init.d/vsftpd /etc/rc5.d/S56vsftpd

On Solaris Sparc:
#vi /etc/services - uncomment
-> ftp 21/tcp
#vi /etc/inetd.conf - uncomment
-> ftp stream tcp nowail root /usr/sbin/in.ftpd in.ftpd
# vi /etc/ftpd/ftpuser - to uncomment "root" out
-> # root
#vi /etc/shells - put in all the shell as possible
-> /usr/sbin/ksh
#vi /etc/default/login - to uncomment
-> CONSOLE=/dev/console
check ftp.allow and ftp.deny files as well
#kill -HUP pid - to restart #/usr/sbin/inetd -s