rhldevel(a)assursys.co.uk wrote:
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Chris Ricker wrote:
>On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 rhldevel(a)assursys.co.uk wrote:
>
>
>
>>There's always a trade-off between security and ease-of-use. What proportion
>>of the installed base of Linux clients use RPC-based protocols? Not many I'd
>>wager, suggesting that the trade-off can be biased towards security, with
>>little-to-no impact on the majority of users.
>>
>>
>Most Linux client systems, in my experience, are NFS clients and therefore
>need portmap, statd, and lockd out-of-the-box.
>
>
For libraries, labs, schools and universities, that wouldn't surprise me.
Such organisations generally have good-to-excellent security awareness.
But for small-to-medium businesses (who have the least security awareness
and infrastructure) and home users (similarly), I'd categorically disagree.
If any file/print sharing is happening in these environments, it's usually
SMB based. Samba doesn't get enabled by default, so why the exception for
portmap and rpc.statd?
>later,
>chris
>
>
Best Regards,
Alex.
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Apache is quite possibly used in by more users than NFS and it is not
enabled by default either. I think that if portmap is really that
necessary, and I don't think it is, having it configured to only listen
on loopback - akin to the stock sendmail configuration - would be a good
step. If the admin wants to enable NFS, they tweak the config or a
sysconfig entry and voila, they are on the network. Asking an admin
that wants to use NFS to do a couple of chkconfig statements is not
much, especially when it reduces the network footprint of the stock install.