On Friday 22 Mar 2002 18:22, Vernon wrote: > Not sure if this is the right place to post this question (I'm new here) > but I was wondering if anyone could tell me if it is safe to turn off > portmap on my Linux Red Hat box. As far as I know I am not using RPC for > anything and therefore not necessary. Am I incorrect? > You don't mention which version of redhat. I've had no problem simply not installing portmap with redhat prior to 7.1. With 7.2 I got errors that the fam service was trying to use portmap. Fam is a file access monitoring service (see the man page). KDE seems to use fam a lot, so I couldn;t just uninstall fam either. Portmapper is built with TCP wrapper support, and fam (or sgi_fam) runs out of xinetd (which its own access controls). The man page of portmap shows you what to put into your /etc/hosts.allow to restrict use of portmap. Likewise the man page of xinetd will tell you how to control access to fam.
Having said all that, rpcinfo doesn't show fam as registered but it starts out of xinetd, so may not register until it is required (I'm guessing here!). I have seen it registered, when I was trying to work out what was using portmapper. I don't use NFS at all; before anyone asks about that :-) I'd say either don't bother with portmap, but check your messages log file as you may well be getting error messages in there (especially from xinetd). Or just configure fam and portmap, and restrict them to your localhost via xinetd/TCP wrappers. I did the latter - I don't like error mesages :-) Regards, John. -- John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP key available from public key servers
