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Telnet Disabled

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

So you've set up your Linux box. You're PPP connection is working great. Life is free, easy, and wonderful. Then you try to connect to your localhost with telnet. You see:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused.

The error message that a connection has been refused is fairly common in the UNIX world. Most often, it means that the server that you've tried to connect to isn't running the server software to handle your request. In this particular case, chances are that the telnet daemon is not running on your machine, so your telnet client has nothing to connect to. Edit your /etc/inetd.conf file. If you see a line describing in.telnetd, and it has a # in front of it, that line is commented out. That means that the telnet server daemon isn't running. That means you can't connect to it. If you want, remove the # and save the file. Then either reboot or just force inetd to reload its configuration file. You should be able to telnet to your machine now.

This may show up in other places. For instance, if you can't ftp to your machine because it refuses the connection, check inetd.conf to make sure that the ftp server is actually being run when you connect.

Of course, bear in mind that telnet has been disabled for a reason. All information, including passwords, is sent in the clear when using telnet. Perhaps using ssh would be a better choice.