Re: turning off orbit and such

[Chris Evans <chris ferret lmh ox ac uk>]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, rob smith wrote:

> The debate over firewall security and orbit etc...is very interesting.  
> A lot of you make good cases for your opinion. I am relatively new to
> linux, could someone please take a moment to explain how to make ORBIT
> use the linux socks or turn off tcp etc... I have *no idea* how to do
> any of this and it sounds complex.  If someone could be so kind as to
> lay out a few steps I would appreciate it...thanks

Rob

I'm happy to help. If you would like a more secure machine, you need to
disable ORBit listening on TCP sockets.

This can be done by creating a file in your home directory.

The file needs to be called:

.orbitrc

You need to put a single line in this file:

ORBIIOPIPv4=0


To verify it has worked, use "netstat -ao | grep LISTEN". Before you make
the change, you will probably get several lines corresponding to listening
TCP sockets at port 1024 or more.

After making the change and restarting X and your GNOME desktop, you
should observe a large decrease in the number of lines reported by the
netstat command.

Let me know if you have any troubles/questions and I'll help you out.

Cheers
Chris

PS. I can't resist but suggest this illustrates the risk of what GNOME is
doing by default. We've created a security risk. It is not obvious the
risk is there. It is not obvious how to correct the risk.

PPS. Re-reading, this is disturbingly reminiscent of making NT secure -
you have to create loads of magic registry settings to make NT even
remotely secure.