From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Oct 12 10:40:31 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from palrel1.hp.com (palrel1.hp.com [156.153.255.242]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 157A437B66D for ; Thu, 12 Oct 2000 10:40:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from adlmail.cup.hp.com (adlmail.cup.hp.com [15.0.100.30]) by palrel1.hp.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 05B1B73; Thu, 12 Oct 2000 10:40:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cup.hp.com (gauss.cup.hp.com [15.28.97.152]) by adlmail.cup.hp.com (8.9.3 (PHNE_18546)/8.9.3 SMKit7.02) with ESMTP id KAA01300; Thu, 12 Oct 2000 10:40:27 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <39E5F78B.299628F6@cup.hp.com> Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 13:40:27 -0400 From: Marcel Moolenaar Organization: Hewlett-Packard X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Garance A Drosihn Cc: arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/etc inetd.conf References: <15251.971315263@winston.osd.bsdi.com> <39E5384C.4C3C0D53@cup.hp.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Garance A Drosihn wrote: > > > > grep -qs '^telnet' /etc/inetd.conf > > > if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then > > > echo "" > > > echo "*** Note: telnetd is enabled in /etc/inetd.conf" > > > echo "*** either comment it out of there, or" > > > echo "*** delete this check in /root/.bashrc" > > > echo "" > > > fi > > > >This message is targetted for an audience that doesn't know whether or > >not telnetd is enabled in inetd.conf. The contradiction is in the > >assumption that these people care about security. They don't; otherwise > >they would know whether telnetd was enabled or not. Therefore, the > >message is meaningless. > > As I explicitly mentioned in the paragraph after that code, > "The text of the message needs to be improved, of course" I don't think that rephrasing will change the root purpose of the message and therefore the usefulness of the message :-) In principle the idea is good. It just doesn't fit the unix philosofy, IMO. I for one would be insulted by it as I'm already insulted by most of the security related, well intended, highly unwanted and in your face notices that tell me things I already know or tell me things I don't care about. example: I installed ucd-snmp yesterday to try something out. I know it installed a daemon, because it tells me so (in this case I already knew before I typed make). I therefore immediately know that security, if I'd care in the first place, would be an issue. In this case I couldn't care less. What happens? I get a security notice... It took me 5 minutes to funnel my agression :-) -- Marcel Moolenaar mail: marcel@cup.hp.com / marcel@FreeBSD.org tel: (408) 447-4222 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message