Centos 4.4 and blocked ports but no firewall?

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I have had CentOS running on my desktop for quite some time (several
> months) with no firewall or other security enhancements.   I just set up
> a service on a special port, but port scanning from other machines on
> the lan (machines that have no firewall either) cannot the port on the
> centos box.
> 
> I am able to telnet into localhost <special port>, but a telnet of
> <local ip> <special port> from lan boxen say connection refused.
> 
> I have a simple linksys box that is not blocking anything internally.
> 
> I specifically disabled all port filtering on the centos box to keep it
> as open as possible.
> 
> What am I missing?

This may or may not be your issue:
When creating a socket, you can specify which interface(s) to bind to.  If
this is a program of your own, check the address being passed to the bind()
system call (I think...).

If it's someone else's program, there's probably a config file option of
some sort that tells it what local address to bind to.  If it's set to
127.0.0.1, then you would see the thing you describe.  Grep for "127.0.0.1"
and "localhost" in the config files, and replace those with the real
hostname/routable IP address.

HTH,
Matt

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