[ILUG] telnet problem

[kevin lyda]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 09:17:34PM +0000, Robin Strahan wrote:
> One of the port forwards/tunnel is to a newsgroup server on port 119.
> "ssh -L 119:newsserver:119 username at remote_machine"
> 
>  This should allow me to connect to the news server if i direct my
> news reader to connect to port 119 on the localhost.
> 
> For some reason this will only work under root login. A normal user
> login won't allow the connection. (connection refused).  Under normal
> login I CAN however access another port forward on port 1080.

so this fails:

    ssh -L 119:newsserver:119 regular.user at remote_machine

but this works:

    ssh -L 119:newsserver:119 root at remote_machine

the reason is because only root can listen on ports less than 1024.
it's a vestigial bit of host based security back when naive people could
almost believe that only trusted people had root on the net.  this time
was ending back when there was an american president bush, richard dean
anderson starred in a hit tv series and steve jobs was running a company
that was shipping well designed unix desktops in snazzy hardware.

oh crap.  is it really 2005 or am i just having some weird dream after
a two night all-nighter?

kevin, hoping not to wake up to 5 feet of snow and some goofy project in
       ada or lisp or modula-2 (on a mac, shudder) due in 6 hours...

-- 
kevin lyda ~ dems for torture: salazar(co/10) landrieu(la/08) pryor(ar/08)
kevin at ie.suberic.net ~ nelson(fl/06) nelson(ne/06) lieberman(ct/06) 2/2/04
  Those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil
  as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.  --Bob Herbert, 2/11/04