ssh trouble checklist

[Jim Knoble]

On 2009-06-05 20:03, Dave Yost wrote:

: At 7:24 PM -0400 2009-06-05, Jim Knoble wrote:
: >Recent Fedoras, as well as RHEL v5 and CentOS v5, often have SELinux
: >enabled, which requires that security contexts are set up properly.  The
: >initscript will do that, but merely running sshd from the command won't.
  [...]
: >Also, Fedora/RedHat and cousins have /sbin/service which does a little
: >bit more to set up an environment for daemons to run in (e.g., 'cd /'
: >and clearing some environment).  Best is (as root):
: >
: >    /sbin/service sshd start
: 
: Thanks! Hope to see all this wisdom on the openssh web site someday.

The wisdom really should be in the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS documentation,
rather than on the OpenSSH website.  The OpenSSH maintainers can't
possibly investigate and keep up with all the customizations and
constraints that operating system developers put in their custom-built
OpenSSH packages.

Both RHEL <http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/> and CentOS
<http://www.centos.org/docs/5/> have excellent documentation, and Fedora
is doing a good job of putting theirs together.  Other Linux distros
have comparable documentation.

Note that this problem is not unique to those Linux distros either, or
even to Linux.  Pretty much every OS has its own "service framework",
and someone starting services with admin privileges really should
consult OS documentation (or, where necessary and available, source
code) if they're unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of the system, in my
opinion.

Best,
jim

-- 
jim knoble  |  jmknoble at pobox.com  |  http://www.pobox.com/~jmknoble/
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