[Rule-list] RULE and Networking (Observations)

[Geoff Burling]

First, I am aware that RULE is alpha-quality software. It is very
reliable in many respects (unlike the software of a certain US
corporation located to the North of me), but unreliable in
others. The point of this post is to document some of these
unreliable characteristics.

1. I installed the networking packages of RULE -- selecting the network,
sendmail, & sshd options -- but found the network abilities less than
complete. One item I noticed that was not installed was the rpm
for xinetd, 7.x's replacement for the more familiar inetd demon.
Since I haven't been following the RULE mailing list from the
beginning, I don't know if the omisison was intentional -- & done
for good reaons -- or an oversight.

2. Although the ethernet card link light is showing green, I do not
have full functionality. For example, I cannot telnet to my main
computer on my LAN, although I could telnet to it when I was running
an old version of Slackware on my 486, & I can also telnet into it
from my SparcStation 10. (This is running an incomplete installation
of Debian Linux.) However, I can ssh into the 486 from my main computer
with no problem.

3. Further, ping has been demonstrating some, er, interesting qualities.
I can ping the testbed 486 from the main computer, but from the testbed
cannot ping the main computer, nor the SparcStation. However, if I
do a ``ping -b 192.168.1.255" (my LAN is on the 192.168.1.0 subnet),
the testbed can ping all of the other computers.

4. The following is an nmap probe of the 486 from my main computer:

Starting nmap V. 2.53 by address@hidden ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on zander (192.168.1.101):
(The 1519 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port       State       Service
22/tcp     open        ssh
111/tcp    open        sunrpc
827/tcp    open        unknown
2048/tcp   open        dls-monitor

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1 second

(I have enabled nfs by running ``/sbin/service nfs start"; the relevant
script in /etc/init.d doesn't appear to properly start it.)

Although sendmail was installed by default, neither port 25 or 110
(the assigned SMTP & POP ports) are visible. However, sendmail *is*
running:

address@hidden nmap-2.53]$ ps -ef | grep sendmail
root       521     1  0 Jul24 ?        00:00:04 sendmail: accepting connections
geoff     7456   562  0 22:15 pts/0    00:00:00 grep sendmail
address@hidden nmap-2.53]$ ps aux | grep sendmail
root       521  0.0  2.0  5320  376 ?        S    Jul24   0:04 sendmail: accepti
geoff     7458  0.0  2.4  1444  448 pts/0    S    22:15   0:00 grep sendmail

5. Lastly, running nfs has some interesting problems. While I admit
that I'm not an nfs guru (I only started making this function work
a week ago), I'm having problems mounting mounting directories under
the / filesystem. I suspect this is because the testbed computer is not
opening transient ports (I can supply log entries if someone
wants to challenge my nfs configuratin skils). What makes this even
more puzzling is the fact I can successfully mount any removable disk
-- /mnt/floppy, /mnt/floppy1 (the 5-1/4 inch floppy drive), &
/mnt/cdrom -- via nfs. (I entertained myself by taking an iso file on
the nfs-mounted cdrom drive & burning it to a cdrom on my main computer.
The iso image works quite nicely.)

If the reason for these network quirks are not my own incompetence, it
suggests that we need to rethink what should be included in the network
packages so that RULE offers full network functionality.

Geoff