Stealth

[sn0wflake]

Checking my PC for open/closed/stealth ports on www.grc.com produced a surprising result. The main part of the ports are reported as closed and some open. Doing the same test in Windows XP resulted in all ports as stealth (after I patched up the system). I always expected Linux systems as having a tight security policy.
Why's Knoppix so open unlike Windows XP?

[Stephen]

Why's Knoppix so open unlike Windows XP?

Because you have not put a proper firewall in place thus have left open ports that have services running on them. You should go to Kano's (http://kanotix.com/files/) script page and get and run the remove-servers.sh script to get rid of the services running or track them down individually and remove them.

A list of firewalls:

http://rocky.molphys.leidenuniv.nl/
http://www.bastille-linux.org/
http://firestarter.sourceforge.net/
http://www.simonzone.com/software/guarddog/

[Harry Kuhman]

Because you have not put a proper firewall in place thus have left open ports that have services running on them. You should go to Kano's (http://kanotix.com/files/) script page and get and run the remove-servers.sh script ...

Are all of those servers listed in the script actually running in Knoppix when it boots, or are they just on the disc? It looks like the script just removes them to get the space back avfter a hard disk install.

[Stephen]

Are all of those servers listed in the script actually running in Knoppix when it boots, or are they just on the disc? It looks like the script just removes them to get the space back avfter a hard disk install.

No they do not run after install but when you upgrade the packages they will get started during the configuration process with the shutdown and restart of the daemons in the install scripts, now in the first case they will not be running but when the restart happens they get started. I did this just last night testing a HD put the last version of knoppix on it and upgraded everything just to make it do a lot of read/writes and when I rebooted I had NIS, Apache, Squid, ISDN, SSH, ... even the brltty braille terminal was started what a mess!! only good thing about it was it looks like the HD is ok.

[sn0wflake]

Thank you Stephen. I'll give the firewalls a go again :)