Re: identd with FreeBSD 6.0?

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Kevin Lamothe wrote:

> Yeah I know the inetd one works, but none of the standalone daemons seem 
> to work with FreeBSD6, I'm using the latest oidentd on my FreeBSD 5 
> server. I used the same config on both of them.
>
> Theres no firewall on the machines its self, and hosts.allow and deny 
> are blank.

The usual steps in debugging are:

(1) Make sure that inetd has properly bound the TCP port.  Telnet to the
     port and see if you can connect.

(2) If you can connect, see if you can make an ident request -- you can
     read RFC 1413 to learn about the protocol, but the short of it is that
     you enter two port numbers, separated by a comma, reflecting server
     port and client port.

(3) If you can connect but the connection closes immediately, check the
     system logs for an ident-related error from inetd or identd.  The
     inetd man page talks some about error logging, and I assume whatever
     third party daemon you're using will likewise talk about it.  If the
     third party daemon doesn't document how its logging and debugging
     works, I recommend against using it.

You may find tools like ktrace(1) useful, inetd's -d mode, and so on.

Robert N M Watson