The reason for installing ssh in this case was for troubleshooting, although higher security would be a positive side effect.
He reports trouble from an unknown source, and telnetd is "involved". Installing ssh would allow comparisons of the failure modes with different network login clients. If it failed with telnetd and worked with ssh, well then that would isolate the problem to something related to telnetd. If it failed with telnetd and failed with ssh, then the problem is probably not the the telnetd package (although there are possibilites) rsh could be used in a similar troubleshooting manner, although a side effect of installing rsh would probably be lower security rather than higher... Some people ask why and/or complain Debian has more than 1 package that can provide "Q" where Q is webserving or DHCPing, or BIND versions, or whatever. I think the ability to troubleshoot problems by trying alternate programs is an excellent reason to have "multiple packages doing the same thing". Craig Sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Eray Ozkural (exa)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, au> [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: (bcc: Vince Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight) 01/06/2001 Fax to: 11:36 PM Subject: Bug#81396: root shell fscked after upgrade to woody Please respond to Craig Sanders; Please respond to 81396 On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 04:38:10AM +0200, Eray Ozkural (exa) wrote: > We use telnet here because this is a diverse university network; we > can't force people to run ssh and any moron could go root on this > machine if he really wanted to. why not? the most you'd have to do is put up a single web page with links to local copies of ssh clients for various platforms...and optionally replace telnetd with a script (or tcp-wrapper's "twist" capability) which printed a message displaying the URL and advising the user to install an ssh client. telnet problem solved with a minimum of user support calls. there's really no excuse for running (non-ssl) telnetd any more. good free ssh clients are available for just about every operating system. craig -- craig sanders -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]